NEW FURNITURE
Tendo Mokko Co., Ltd.
Kōhei Sugiura [Designer]
Kōhei Sugiura [Designer]: NEW FURNITURE. Yamagata-Ken, Japan: Tendo Mokko Co., Ltd., 1963. Original edition. Text in Japanese. Slim quarto. Photo illustrated saddle stitched wrappers. 48 pp. Furniture catalog fully illustrated with black and white halftones, shop drawings and two color photographs. Multiple paper stocks with period correct graphic design and typography throughout by Kōhei Sugiura. Middle 4-page signature loose and laid in. Front panel lightly soiled and rubbed with rear panel considerably more abraided. A very good copy. Rare.
9.5 x 9.5-inch furniture catalog with 48 pages devoted to the new designs of Tendo Mokko, circa 1963, with photography by Mitsuo Katsui, Masao Usui, Kenmochi Design Studio, Yukio Futagawa, Akio Kawasumi, and Yosio Watanabe. All curatorial information presented in Japanese.
Features furniture designs by Tokukichi Kato, the Isamu Kenmochi Design Laboratory, Tadaomi Mizunoe, Inui Saburo, Junzo Sakakura, Mitsumasa Sugasawa, Reiko Tanabe, Kenzo Tange, the Yamanaka Group, Sori Yanagi and others.
Tendo Mokko [Tendo Woodworking] was founded in 1940 in the historic woodworking town of Tendo, with the “Tendo Mokko Furniture Joinery Industry Association,”organized by carpenters, joinery, and joiners in the suburbs of Tendo City, Yamagata Prefecture. The first Japanese company to commercialize furniture made of molded plywood Tendo Mokko worked with architects and designers to expand upon the molded plywood experiments in the United States and the Scandinavian countires. Molded plywood enables woodworkers to create lines that could never be achieved with natural wood.
By joining forces with renowned artists like designers Isamu Kenmochi and Sori Yanagi, or architects Kenzo Tange and Arata Isozaki, Tendo Mokko has made style one of the key elements of its collections. The company is also committed to respecting materials in order to make the best use of them. Its artisans leave their wood to rest for five years. Whether made from walnut, oak, sapelli, beech, or Japanese cedar or cypress, all of Tendo Mokko’s creations bring together beauty and lightness.
Wood that tries to take an unwavering stand can be knocked over in a stiff wind. Supple, flexible trees, like the willow, remain standing. They have the “graceful strength” to absorb impact, and this is the secret of formed plywood, although it doesn’t start out that way. When plywood is made, all material that might split or break is removed. Artisans carefully consider the characteristics of the original wood and put it through test after test to finally come up with the optimal width and thickness.
Inspired by the willow, which bends but never breaks, Tendo Mokko creates pieces of furniture that can be handed down through the generations—“We will meet Japanese lifestyles and deliver furniture that is passed on from parents to children and grandchildren from the birthplace, Tendo.”
The value of craftsmanship at Tendo Mokko is the pride of the craftsmen who work there, as the founders said: “Yamagata people are valuable because Tendo people make them.”
Throughout his career, Kōhei Sugiura [ b. 1932, Tokyo] has been a pioneering Japanese Graphic Designer, with notable contributions in the fields of record jackets and posters, books, magazines, exhibition catalogues, diagrams, stamps, and more. Sugiura served as a visiting professor for the Ulm School of Design in Germany (1964 – 1967); professor at Kobe Design University (1987 – 2002); and is currently the director of the Asian Design Institute at Kobe Design University.
Sugiura's venture into book design began in the early 1960s when he was brought on as a designer for Document 1961, a book published by Japan Council against A & H Bombs, which included photographs of Ken Domon and Shōmei Tōmatsu. His involvement in photobooks grew significantly from the late 1960s to 1980s, during which Sugiura worked with famed photographers based both in and outside of Japan, including Eikoh Hosoe, Ikko Nakahara, Yutaka Takanashi, and Robert Frank. At a time when photobooks were generally regarded as a reproduction of original images, Sugiura’s approach to book design was notable in that the photobook itself was meant to be considered its own original work.
“The designer is an important part of the process, and figures like Kohei Sugiura and Tadanori Yokoo have been as significant in the development of the postwar Japanese phonebook as the photographers themselves.
“Prior to Provoke, the two most important bookworks of the 1960s were designed by Sugiura—finely crafted objects in the best Japanese tradition, combined with hard-hitting radical photography: Killed by Roses [1963] by Eikoh Hosoe and The Map [1965] by Kikiuji Kawada elevated the nominally literal photojournalistic mode to an astonsihing level of allusion and symbol, and might be considered the first Provoke book. In its fastidious roughness and its despairing exploration of A-Bomb/Americanization themes, it set a model that was later equalled but never bettered.” — Parr/Badger, The Photobook: A History Volume 1, 2004, p. 269
Sugiura’s design for Kikuji Kawada’s The Map [1965] propelled his reputation as a formidable book designer among Japanese art critics and continues to be regarded as a seminal work in the history of photobooks. Given that Kawada photographs include images of the war’s aftermath and shadow like imprints burned into the walls of the Atomic Bomb Dome, Sugiura wanted to design a book that would necessitate longer and more intimate interactions with the book. The Map features a book of Kawada’s work, a brown insert of text by Kenzaburo Ōe, and a two part slipcase. When the exterior part of the slipcase is removed, the interior part encases the book with 2 sets of doors (a panel on each edge of the book). When all four panels, the reader can see have words, related to images’ content, printed in a list wrapping around the circumference of the book — though the orientation of the text would require one to rotate the entire case in order to read it. Within the photobook, each page is folded so that a single spread contains outer image and hidden inner images, once again requiring greater physically engagement than a standard book. Sugiura joined the folded pages through an uncommon binding process that relied solely on glue.