Experts on Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) architectural history depend on documentation in the archives to produce new scholarly work. Yet, what we find there may not be sufficient to produce the detailed stories we hope to write and long to read. In 2015, I set out to craft a history of the earliest architects of Japanese ancestry in the United States as a Smithsonian fellow with access to the institution’s many collections. I was stunned by the extraordinarily deep resources on some subjects, like Japanese pavilions at world’s fairs,¹ and far thinner primary sources for documenting Japanese American experiences, standpoints, and perspectives. More recent acquisitions often reflected Franklin Odo’s powerful influence on improving the presentation of AAPI heritage in the National Museum of American History. One of the most touching items was correspondence from Kinji Imada, a Nisei incarcerated at Gila River, aspiring to attend architecture school upon his release from internment camp.²

The project that consumed my next decade, which required locating the papers, photographs, and drawings of Japanese American architects, landscape architects, designers, and their families, proved elusive. With the exception of the most familiar names, such as Yamasaki and Obata, those who practiced from the 1890s through the 1960s were not well-known figures. Their papers largely remained in private hands rather than formal archives or special collections.³

Writing the history of architects of Japanese ancestry required sifting through scattered collections never intended to provide focused coverage of AAPI buildings and landscapes, within or beyond the Smithsonian’s collecting units. Telling their stories required exiting the archives to search out practitioners and their descendants who privately held the papers, objects, and memories to document their lives and careers. This experience informed my sense that writing new AAPI architectural histories required active efforts to expand the archives.

1. Larry Zim, World’s Fair Collection 1841–1988, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, https://www.si.edu/object/archives/sova-nmah-ac-0519.

2. Rejection letter from Yale University, July 14, 1945, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1293500 (accessed July 11, 2024).

3. The rare exception was that Columbia University’s Avery Library had collected the architectural drawings of Yasuo Matsui, America’s most distinguished skyscraper architect during the interwar years. The collection’s label, under the name of Matsui’s architectural engineering firm, F. H. Dewey & Co., complicates researchers’ attempts to locate these papers. A complete inventory of this collection can be found at https://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/inside/avery_assets/Matsui.pdf.

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