George Matsumoto, North Carolina State College professor of architecture, circa 1958.
College of Design History- George Matsumoto
March 22, 2024
This blog is part of a series of posts featuring stories and photos from NC State’s College of Design, formerly School of Design. In celebration of the College’s 75th anniversary, the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) created an exhibit titled “College of Design: 75 Years of Designing Tomorrow.” The exhibit opens in the D.H. Hill Jr. Library’s exhibit gallery after spring break March 2024. Graduate students Shima Hosseininasab, Kelly Arnold, and Alana Gomez worked together to create content for the exhibit and blog posts.
George Matsumoto (1922-2016) was a Japanese American architect and educator who is most known for his award-winning modernist designs. He was born in 1922 in San Francisco, CA, and attended college at University of California Berkeley from 1938-1941. Matsumoto’s experiences as a Japanese-American man who lived in California during World War II and in the South following the war reveal not only the architect’s personal struggles and successes but larger realities of American life in these tumultuous periods.
Born in 1922, Matsumoto was a Nisei, a second generation Japanese American, whose parents had migrated to the United States as young adults. As a child, Matsumoto remembered experiencing discrimination and recalled attending school and extracurricular activities in a separate setting from white peers. He recalled instances of discrimination and surveillance increasing as the war got closer, though, as a young man, he took little heed of them.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt established Executive Order 9066, a law that enforced the physical removal of all persons from the West Coast deemed a threat to national security. The order’s target population were Japanese Americans, seen as a security threat after the December 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor and as a result of Japan’s position in World War II. Japanese Americans were subject to strict curfews, exclusion from authorized military areas, and sent to "relocation centers" further inland.
Watch oral histories with Matsumoto below:
Under Executive Order 9066, Matsumoto and his family were sent to the "Poston War Relocation Center" in Parker Dam, Arizona. Matsumoto’s family chose to enter a relocation camp rather than waiting to be compelled to enter other camps closer to California. Matsumoto describes himself as one of the last ones in the camp and the first one out because he had been accepted to the architecture program at the Washington University in St. Louis. Matsumoto recalls that the relocation authority issued student visas, and that’s how he could get out of the camp. He got accepted at both Harvard and Washington, but he couldn’t afford Harvard. Students had to have enough funds (their bank accounts were frozen) and the community also needed to accept the Japanese students in order to leave the camp. Matsumoto planned to stay and dine in residence and dining halls on campus but with his father’s bank account frozen because he was labeled “an enemy alien” these spaces became what Matsumoto’s father termed a “luxury you need to get over.” Matsumoto had to work throughout his degree for room and board, living with two local families in St. Louis. Having had trouble with transferring his Berkeley courses, Matsumoto didn’t graduate with a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the school until 1944.
Matsumoto met Henry Kamphoefner, the dean who started the School of Design at NC State, at the University of Oklahoma. Kamphoefner was passionate about Modernist design and eager to move toward structural design over the decorative emphasis of the Beaux-Arts movement. Kamphoefner also had a strong network of upcoming architects and a strong personality which would allow him to manage the distinct personnel assembled within the School of Design. Matsumoto traveled to Raleigh with Kamphoefner, and as a result his work with small house designs and his innovative use of materials, advanced quickly at the School.
(Above) known as the George Matsumoto or Matsumoto House, the house was designed and built between 1952 and 1953. The house received notable recognition, as it was featured on the cover of Architectural Record in 1957 and won the 1957 American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Honor Award. In 1958, the house was selected for a display at the Brussels World's Fair in Belgium. The plexiglass architectural model here was designed by Robert F. Geoghagan and sent to Brussels in a custom shipping box for the display. The model was returned to Raleigh, North Carolina, after the Brussels World's Fair and remained in the Matsumoto house for decades. In 2014, the owner of the Matsumoto house, Huston Paschal, donated the model to Special Collections.
In 1948, Matsumoto became a faculty member at the School of Design. During his tenure at the School, Matsumoto won more than thirty awards for his residential work, and his achievements in design were widely published. Matsumoto was concerned about the modern ideas of efficiency and cost of the building. He was detail-oriented and concerned about building efficiency and cost. A prominent feature of his buildings are their panelized design, which is usually misconstrued as a style of Japanese architecture, rather than concern for efficiency and cost. He tried to minimize waste of materials, a hallmark of a Depression era upbringing. In his own words, “Architecture has become for me a wedding of the technical and the art.”
Many faculty members, including Matsumoto himself, designed residences and commercial buildings that are still celebrated today. During 1952–1954, Matsumoto established his own architectural practice and office based out of the award-winning George Matsumoto House. Matsumoto recalls in an interview that few North Carolina residents were interested in Modernist houses, but as the School gained more attention, more enthusiasm for the style developed.
After thirteen years in North Carolina, George and his family returned to California in 1961, settling in Oakland. In addition to teaching at UC Berkeley, George continued to practice architecture and was inducted as a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1973.
Explore more on Matsumoto’s finding aid and digitized collections of images.
“College of Design: 75 Years of Designing Tomorrow” opens in March 2024 in the exhibit gallery of the D.H. Hill Jr. Library. You can visit the exhibit during Hill Library’s hours for the rest of the year.
If you have any questions or are interested in viewing Special Collections materials, please contact us at library_specialcollections@ncsu.edu or submit a request online. The Special Collections Research Center is open by appointment only. Appointments are available Monday–Friday, 9am–6pm and Saturday, 1pm–5pm. Requests for a Saturday appointment must be received no later than Tuesday of the same week.