Edward Suzuki was born of German and Japanese parentage in 1947 in Sayama City, Saitama Prefecture, Japan. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Notre Dame and Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University. He worked part time at the office of master architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller while attending Harvard on a Fullbright scholarship. He also worked with Shoji Sadao, where he became acquainted and worked hand in hand with the late Japanese-American sculptor, Isamu Noguchi and went on to work for Kenzo Tange in Tokyo. These exceptional experiences may have contributed to the reason he considers himself to be a “student of life,” regularly contemplating the structure of the atom, the environment, philosophy, and the metaphysical.

Edward started his own practice in Tokyo in 1977 and has his office now in Nishi-Azabu, Tokyo. He was a Visiting Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design for a semester and while there was invited to serve as a Visiting Critic at his alma mater Harvard. Edward’s bold but simple architectural designs draw from influences both East and West, and have taken shape as far away as Kenya and China. They’ve also brought him numerous major design awards nationally as well internationally, including the prestigious“GREEN GOOD DESIGN Award 2011” from the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design for a house he designed in Shimogamo, Kyoto. He has published many books and papers internationally: among them, his pride and joy being “Atommetrics: Another View of the Atom Based on Electron Orbital Geometry” which was published in an international science periodical FORMA. Famous among his works are “Eddi’s House,” a prefabricated system he created with Daiwa House Industry, which incorporates his designs into mass-produced housing, and of course, the St. Mary’s campus redesign. One of Edward’s most recent projects was designing a new boarding school called the International School of Asia, Karuizawa (ISAK) which opened in 2014. As he himself has graduated from St. Mary’s International School in Tokyo which used to have a boarding department, he wanted to share how “living together in such an environment, sharing childhood days makes one grow up to naturally dismiss wars and conflicts as meaningless.”

As a“Find Your Element”Leader, Edward will deliver a 90-minute Workshop partly derived from the 2015 TEDx Tokyo presentation on“GOoD DESIGN=LOVE・EVOLUTION.” He will extend this TEDx talk to include his most recent findings on love, peace and compassion through his research and his own life experiences. The goal of this workshop is to give participants an opportunity to understand how our mental environment (mind) has the power to change our body (DNA), our physical nature. By bringing in examples from the world of quantum physics and Einstein’s final conclusion of the “ultimate force in life,” Edward debunks life’s mystery to help transcend all challenges to realize our element.