Memories of Professor Mamoru Kawaguchi

Abstract

My association with Mamoru Kawaguchi was almost exclusively through the International Association of Spatial Structures (IASS). When I was elected to the Executive Council in 1986, Mamoru was already the treasurer of the Association and soon became vice president and right-hand man to Professor Yoshikatsu Tsuboi (who became President of the IASS in 1986). Of course, I was exposed to Mamoru and his accomplishments through his oral presentations at IASS symposia and I enjoyed getting to know him more personally through the social events surrounding IASS events. Mamoru was always willing to step up to major responsibilities as an officer of the IASS, and when Professor Tsuboi died in 1990 in the midst of his second term as president, Professor Kawaguchi agreed to step in as president. After a period taken up with his responsibilities as a Dean at Hosei University (where he had served on the faculty since 1972), he was again elected president of the IASS from 2000 to 2006, making him the only member of the Association who served two distinct periods as president. Throughout the 1980s to the 2000s, he frequently served as a plenary speaker at IASS symposia and colloquia (as well as at other international conferences), representing the Association around the world. He also played a major role in the broadening of IASS activities in Asia in the 1980s, when there was an increasing number of members from Japan and other Asian countries and IASS conferences began to be held in the East. I was always particularly struck by the keynote plenary addresses that Mamoru presented at IASS symposia. His lectures demonstrated his creativity and innovation and were always based on careful analytical investigations and ingenuous model studies as well as on an acute evaluation of aesthetics. Yet there could be a playfulness in his design projects as best illustrated by his successful design and deployment of a giant flying carp to the delight of Japanese schoolchildren. He was a great mentor and teacher of students and younger colleagues. I was also delighted to host Mamoru at my university and home, sometimes with colleagues. He came several times to the difficult-to-reach area of upstate New York to observe and photograph spatial structures such as the Carrier Dome, an inflatable roof stadium in the nearby city of Syracuse which was designed by Walter Bird and fabricated and erected by his firm, Birdair. Mamoru visited our computer graphics lab to see our work on computer-aided design of spatial structures and was kind enough to give a lecture to our graduate students on his pantadome system. I also vividly remember the tour that he led for a few of us on the occasion of the 1997 Singapore symposium to personally show us the pantadome he had designed there, and a more recent similar tour in 2016 of the 1964 Olympic structures in Tokyo that he had designed with Professor Tsuboi. Finally, I will always remember the hospitality that he showed during the 2001 Nagoya symposium while he was president of the IASS; he not only entertained small groups of us at a traditional Japanese inn but also hosted a huge post-symposium party for the EC members and guests with much jollity, singing and drinking. In my opinion, Mamoru’s three main contributions to the design of spatial structures were his development of the pantadome system, his achievements in the area of Memories of Professor Mamoru Kawaguchi