George Matsumoto Architectural Drawings Digitized

The Special Collections Research Center is pleased to announce that additional Matsumoto architectural drawings are now available online . The George Matsumoto Papers were acquired in the late 1990s and contain important materials documenting Matsumoto's work, including correspondence, photographs, architectural drawings and sketches, and other materials. George Matsumoto's work was documented in a publication from 1997 called "Simplicity, Order, and Discipline: The work of  George Matsumoto from the NCSU Libraries' Special Collections." In this book, a number of scholars weighed in on the importance of his work. Former College (then School) of Design architecture faculty member Robert Burns wrote, "George Matsumoto's North Carolina legacy is distinctive, and, in many ways, heroic. He created a body of exceptional buildings....he also offered an example of integrity and dedication to principle that will long endure."

Matsumoto was born in 1922 in San Francisco, California, and earned his B. A. in Architecture from Washington University. He studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and later worked with various architectural firms. Soon thereafter he joined NC State's new School of Design in 1948 until he left for Berkeley in 1961. Matsumoto was brought to NC State by Henry L. Kamphoefner , the first Dean of the School of Design. Matsumoto is considered to be one of the key early faculty members at Design, and especially important as a practitioner and teacher who promoted modernist architecture. Matsumoto was influenced by leading architects such as Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer; Burns wrote that "The ideas that mattered most to George Matsumoto as a designer and as a teacher were those that served as the focal themes of the modern movement: strict adherence to functional demands, clarity of plan, structural logic and expression, economy of means, perfection of detail, and the rationalization of construction processes tending toward industrialization."

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