David B. Stewart was born in Washington, D.C. in 1942, and passed away on April 3rd, 2025. He pursued his education at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts with honours in the History of Art (1960–1964), and later at the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London, where he completed his PhD in the History of European Art under the supervision of Professor Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1964–1972), with a thesis about Le Corbusier. Before moving to Japan, he was a member of the editorial staff of L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui in Paris.
Since 1976, he taught history and theory of architecture at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (now Tokyo Institute of Science), where he worked closely with influential figures such as Kazuo Shinohara, whose work he helped to contextualize and promote internationally. Stewart became one of the most important Western interpreters of Shinohara’s thought, a colleague and a key disseminator of his architectural philosophy. In his later years, he was appointed Specially Appointed Professor at the same institution.
Stewart published extensively on both modern European architecture and contemporary Japanese architects. His seminal book The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture: 1868 to the Present (1987) remains a fundamental reference in the field. He also co-authored Arata Isozaki: Architecture 1960–1990 and contributed essays to monographs on Kenzo Tange and Tadao Ando. En relación con Kazuo Shinohara, escribió Kazuo Shinohara: Centennial Hall, Tokyo (1995), un estudio detallado sobre una de las obras más emblemáticas del arquitecto, y coeditó Kazuo Shinohara: View from This Side, una recopilación de ensayos y fotografías que ofrece una visión crítica e integral de su legado.
Fluent in Japanese and French, Stewart served as a translator and cultural mediator, contributing significantly to the international understanding of postwar Japanese architecture.
