The First Architectural Drawings for Keio University by Sone Chujo Architectural Office

2023/06/23

The Sone Chujo Architectural Office, established by Tatsuzo Sone and Seiichiro Chujo, is said to have been the largest and finest private architectural firm in the pre-war era. Their representative work, which readers are likely familiar with, is the red-brick Mita Media Center (Keio University Library) (Old Building). It was the first of the firm's works to be designated as an Important Cultural Property and has, needless to say, been loved as a symbol of Keio University. Seven buildings designed by the firm remain at Keio University today, including the library, but if we include lost works such as the Mita Public Hall, where a unicorn gargoyle once looked down on Keio students from the balcony, more than 30 buildings were actually designed by the firm. Why was this the case?

The exhibition "Sone Chujo Architectural Office and Keio University," starting June 27 at the Keio History Museum, will broaden its scope to include not only existing buildings but also many that have since been lost. For example, at the Shinanomachi Campus, the firm handled everything from the overall concept to the design of the school buildings and hospital, but because they were made of wood, most were lost in air raids. At the Hiyoshi Campus, although the firm developed the grand design, the project ended halfway due to the deaths of Sone and Chujo, as well as the impact of the war. In conjunction with Hiyoshi, a major renovation of Mita was also underway. It is no exaggeration to say that the influence of the firm remains strongly reflected in the current appearance of Keio University.

During preparations for this exhibition, a record was discovered from 1971 showing that the Office of Juku History (the predecessor of the Fukuzawa Memorial Center) received 52 tubes of original architectural drawings for Keio-related buildings from the Chujo Architectural Office, run by Seiichiro Chujo's son, Kunio. These were not copies like blueprints, but the actual drawings hand-drawn by the designers. Upon searching for these 52 tubes with the cooperation of the engineering staff at the Office of Facilities and Property Management and checking them one by one, it was confirmed that various drawings for a significant number of buildings remained, including drawings for many of the buildings in Shinanomachi lost in the air raids. The oldest drawing was for this wooden Western-style school building, "Building No. 6." It is dated 1908, the year the office was established. It was completed the following year, three years earlier than the library, and was located near the current Graduate School Building (pictured in the postcard below). In 1939, it was relocated to Hiyoshi to become the preparatory school building for the Fujiwara Institute of Technology, only to be lost in an air raid six years later.

In the exhibition, we would like to not only introduce the buildings and their drawings but also consider why it was Sone and Chujo, focusing particularly on their connection and ideological resonance with Keio University.

(Takeyuki Tokura, Associate Professor, Keio Institute for Fukuzawa Memorial Center for Modern Japanese Studies)