Kunio Maekawa was a Japanese architect and a key figure in Japanese postwar modernism. After early stints in the studios of Le Corbusier and Antonin Raymond, Maekawa began to articulate his own architectural language after establishing his own firm in 1935, maintaining a continuous tension between Japanese traditional design and European modernism throughout his career. Firmly insistent that both civic and vernacular architecture should be rendered through a modernist lens appropriate to the contemporary lifestyle of the Japanese people, Maekawa's early work and competition entries consistently pushed back against the dominant Imperial Crown Style. His postwar prefab housing projects borrowed from manufacturing strategies in the automotive industry to create houses that privileged light, ventilation, and openness against the feudal hierarchical principles perpetuated by the interior divisions found in traditional Japanese homes.

Antonin Raymond, born as Antonín Reimann was a Czech American architect. Raymond was born and studied in Bohemia, working later in the United States and Japan. Raymond was also the Consul of Czechoslovakia to Japan from 1926 to 1939, in which year the Czech diplomacy was closed down after the occupation of the European country by Nazi Germany.