2024 Volume 89 Issue 817 Pages 568-577
Keiichi Morita visited the South Seas—former German then Japanese colonies—in summer 1938 to investigate Indigenous architecture. The newly found sources, however, indicate his interest lay rather in the footsteps of his predecessors, German expedition members. He then recalls these years as ‘a blank period’ later, silencing his South Seas related activities and regarding the ‘primitive architecture’ as belonging to an incomprehensible architectural state of ‘transcendency’. This research elucidates these peculiar behaviours through the lens of Morita’s characteristic attitudes towards his lifelong academic research into classical architectural theories; his belief in the significance of reading the original sources.
