Message for Dr. Shoichi Kajima’s Memorial delivered by Professor Peter G. Rowe on July 14, 2021.

“Well after his passing in 2020, Dr. Shoichi Kajima is and will be gratefully and respectfully remembered by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. where he received his Master of Architecture degree in 1957 prior to his PhD in architecture at Tokyo University and his assumption of the directorship of the Kajima Corporation. The great, great grandson of the corporation’s founder, Dr. Kajima oversaw the company’s flourishing as one of the oldest and largest construction companies in Japan, providing services in design, engineering, construction, and real estate. Indeed, during an untimely downturn in the 1990s, he expanded operations into the fledgling yet important environmental sector. Throughout this activity he was particularly involved in the design and construction of the headquarter office buildings, consistently creating spaces that were rational, functional, and restrained without special attachment to style. In addition to receipt of his professional architecture degree from Harvard, Dr. Kajima established the Kajima Chair in Architectural Design in 1989, the fourteenth endowed professorship at the school and occupied since its inception by B. Mack Scogin, the former Chairman of the Department of Architecture. Kajima also served as a member of the Visiting Committee to the Graduate School of Design between 1986 and 1992, contributing to the School’s excellence. Today he is well remembered as a dignified and constant inspiration for generations of architects to come.”

Peter G. Rowe
Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
Former Dean of the Faculty of Design, 1992-2004