Architectural Education Materials (formerly Owned by the

Architectural Education Materials of Kyoto Imperial University: A Hidden Treasure of Japan's Modern Architecture

Tucked away on the Katsura Campus of Kyoto University, in a corner of Building C2, sits a quiet collection that few visitors notice — plaster reliefs, scale models of temples, ancient roof tiles, and curious specimens of building materials. To the untrained eye they look like academic odds and ends. In reality, they form one of Japan's most remarkable archives of modern architectural education: a registered cultural property of 2,653 items, assembled in the 1920s and 1930s as Japan was inventing the very idea of teaching architecture in its own universities.

Officially titled "Architectural Education Materials (Formerly Held by the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto Imperial University)," this collection was the personal project of Takeda Goichi, the architect remembered today as the "father of Kansai architecture." It is a window into how a young nation learned to think about buildings — and into the curiosity of a single, extraordinary scholar.

From Imperial University to Modern Architecture Department

Kyoto Imperial University was established in 1897 by Imperial Edict No. 209, becoming Japan's second imperial university after the one in Tokyo. In 1914 it was reorganized into five constituent colleges, and following the University Ordinance reform of 1919, these colleges were renamed as faculties. The former College of Engineering became the Faculty of Engineering, and in 1920 a new Department of Architecture was established within it.

The department's founding was a milestone. Before this, only the University of Tokyo had a full academic program in architecture, and Japan was still building its own intellectual tradition for the field. The Kyoto founders faced a practical problem: how do you teach architecture in a country that has very few books, materials, or models suitable for a Western-style academic curriculum? Their answer was to build a teaching collection from scratch — and to do it on a scale that would shape generations of architects.

Takeda Goichi: The Architect-Collector Behind the Archive

The driving force behind the collection was Takeda Goichi (1872–1938), a Hiroshima-born architect who had studied at the Imperial University in Tokyo before traveling to Europe in 1901 to research design at Camden Art School in London and across the continent. He returned home steeped in Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession, and would go on to introduce both movements to Japan. He helped found the design program at what is now the Kyoto Institute of Technology, and personally befriended Frank Lloyd Wright, whom he introduced to Japanese audiences.

Appointed an Imperial-rank professor when Kyoto's Department of Architecture was founded, Takeda began acquiring teaching materials a year before the department even opened. From 1919 to 1936, he assembled an astonishingly diverse archive: plaster casts of European ornament, scale models of Japanese temples, samples of stone and glass, foreign tools, and even specimens of termite damage. He was, in the words of one modern commentator, as much a natural historian as an architect — a builder with the mind of a museum curator.

Takeda's other works define the cityscape of modern Kyoto: the Kyoto Prefectural Library, the centenary Clock Tower of Kyoto University, and the great torii of Heian Shrine all bear his hand. But this teaching collection may be his most quietly influential creation, because every Japanese architect trained at Kyoto after 1920 looked at it.

Why It Was Designated a Cultural Property

On March 31, 2006, the entire collection of 2,653 items was registered by the Japanese government as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in the historical-materials category. The designation recognized something unusual: not the artistic merit of any single object, but the value of the collection as a whole — a "living witness" to how architecture was actually taught in Japan during the formative early twentieth century.

Three points make the archive exceptional. First, its breadth: very few institutions anywhere preserve such a complete teaching set from the dawn of modern architecture education. Second, its documentation: a contemporaneous acquisition ledger called the bihin kanshu-cho survives, so the provenance and date of nearly every item can be traced — a rarity for collections of this kind. Third, the presence of objects that are themselves treasures, most famously the architectural drawings of Josiah Conder, which were donated to the department in 1939 and have separately been designated an Important Cultural Property as the largest and finest Conder drawing collection in Japan.

Highlights of the Collection

Visiting the Collection

This is not a museum collection in the usual sense. The materials are an active teaching archive held by Kyoto University, stored and conserved at the university's Katsura Campus in west Kyoto. The collection underwent a major preservation campaign in 2004–2005 when the architecture department moved to Katsura, and a further cleaning and reorganization project was carried out in 2024–2025 by the university's architectural history laboratory.

A selection of the most striking pieces, including the Frank Lloyd Wright Imperial Hotel model and several large plaster reliefs, is displayed on the ground floor of Building C2 at Katsura Campus, where students and visitors to the architecture department can see them in their natural setting — alongside the studios and lecture rooms of the present-day department. The Josiah Conder drawings are not on physical display, but the high-resolution scans on the Kyoto University Rare Materials Digital Archive are freely viewable online.

Visitors interested in seeing the displays should note that the Katsura Campus is a working research campus, not a public-facing tourist site. The most reliable way to see the collection is through one of the occasional public exhibitions organized by the Kyoto University Museum, which has periodically featured items from the archive.

What to See Nearby

Although the bulk of the collection now resides at Katsura, the registered address remains the historic Yoshida Campus in Sakyo Ward — the original home of Kyoto Imperial University. A visit here lets you walk among many of the buildings that Takeda Goichi and his colleagues designed. The Centenary Clock Tower (Hyakushunen Tokeidai), completed in 1925, is the symbolic heart of the campus and a Takeda work. The former Department of Architecture Main Building, now Research Building No. 15, was also designed by him in 1922, and its curved facade and burgundy tiles still stand as a fine example of early modernism in Japan.

Just a short walk away, the Kyoto University Museum on the south side of the campus often hosts exhibitions drawing on the university's vast holdings. Further afield in central Kyoto, Takeda's other major works — the former Kyoto Prefectural Library, Kyoto City Hall, and the great torii of Heian Shrine — offer a fuller picture of his impact on the modern city. For a deeper plunge into early-twentieth-century Japanese design, the Kyoto Institute of Technology Museum and Archives, on the institution where Takeda founded the design program, holds a complementary set of his materials.