2024-08-27
2024-01-04
2023-11-06
Abstract—Umanosuke Funaki (hereafter, Funaki) is a Japanese architectural engineer who worked in Saga, from the late Meiji era to the beginning of the Showa era. He learned architecture at a local technical high school and designed many buildings in Saga after his independence. His representative works are Saga Public Hall, Takatori’s home, Funaki’s own house, etc., but it is particularly well known that he was a designer of the enlargement of the old Koga Bank Head Office (hereafter, K Bank). The documents regarding Funaki’s professional activities are in present archived at Saga University. The contents are widely including design drawings, design documents, photographs, diaries etc. Although the K Bank among these documents and the report was reported by Kyushu Institute of Design in 2002, the other documents remained unfiled without studying. We named the documents "UMANOSUKE FUNAKI ARCHIVES (hereafter, the UF Archives)," and tried to show its characteristics and values as a research source in this paper. It is so rare that quantities of documents on local engineers are kept in archives like this. Moreover, the architectural engineers who worked especially in Saga in this period have neither been surveyed nor been reported yet, although many researchers have researched also on local architectural engineers of all over Japan and their documents have been archived. The UF archives is very valuable not only to clarify the career of Funaki, but also to know the development of the architecture in Saga at that time.