Josiah Conder

• Born: 1852
• Died: 1920

Josiah Conder was one of the most influential architects of the Meiji period, designing the Rokumeikan (1883) and the original main hall of the Tokyo National Museum, as well as instructing or training many of the most prominent Japanese architects of the period.

Conder was trained at the South Kensington School of Art, and worked or studied under architects T. Roger Smith (a distant uncle of his) and William Burges, before joining the Royal Institute of British Architecture.

He first arrived in Japan in 1877, and began teaching in the newly-founded architecture division of the Imperial College of Engineering (Kôbu gakkô). He remained there until 1884, his students including Katayama Tôkuma, Tatsuno Kingo, and Tsumaki Yorinaka, each of whom would go on to design some of Tokyo's most famous buildings.

He completed the original two-story brick main hall of the Tokyo National Museum in 1881, along with a Hokkaidô Products Hall on the banks of the Sumidagawa in the same year. His final commission from the Japanese government - and the final commission by the Meiji government for any foreign architect - was the Ministry of the Navy building at Kasumigaseki, completed in 1895. Two years later, however, he did oversee repairs on the Rokumeikan following an earthquake, installing electric lights, and renovating it otherwise.

References

• Dallas Finn, "Reassessing the Rokumeikan," in Ellen Conan (ed.), Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art, University of Hawaii Press (2006), 227-239.