Nicolas Fiévé

Nicolas Bernard Fiévé is a French historian of Japanese Architecture; he was born in Paris in 1959 and is the son of the cinema decorator, Bernard Fiévé. In 1993, he became a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and in 1996 he joined the Collège de France’s Japanese Civilization research team. In 2007, he was elected Professor at the Historical and Philological Sciences Department at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), where he teaches the history of pre-modern (16th to 19th centuries) Japanese urbanism, architecture and gardens.
== Biography ==
After graduating from secondary school in literary studies, Nicolas Fiévé was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-La Villette. In 1984, shortly after obtaining his DPLG degree and graduating as an architect, he left for Japan with a scholarship from the Japanese government, and he joined the research laboratory in Architectural Theory at the University of Kyoto led by Professor Katō Kunio 加藤邦夫, an architect and phenomenologist as well as a disciple of the modernist Masuda Tomoya 増田友也 (1914-1981) whom he had recently succeeded at the University of Kyōto and who introduced Anthropology of Architecture to Japan. When Nicolas Fiévé joined his research group, Katō Kunio was lecturing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception while finishing a Japanese translation of Christian Noberg-Schulz’s Roots of Modern Architecture and beginning that of Genius Loci. Under the tutelage of this remarkable master, Nicolas Fiévé undertook to study the architecture of medieval Japanese tea houses from a phenomenological perspective and began his research on medieval Japanese architecture and space.

While in Japan, Nicolas Fiévé took an avid interest in the study of Japanese and its different scripts, and upon his return to France in 1986, he decided to further his knowledge of Classical Japanese. The following year, having obtained his undergraduate degree in Japanese, he began a Masters degree in Classical Japanese at the Université Paris VII where he turned out to be the only student of his class. In addition to lectures on Classical Japanese dispensed by Jacqueline Pigeot (Université Paris VII), his thesis supervisor, he also attended Jean-Noël Robert’s (EPHE) and Francine Hérail’s (EPHE) lectures in Sino-Japanese Studies. Throughout this period he earned a living working at the Paris Office of the daily Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun.

In 1988, armed with another scholarship from the Japanese government, Nicolas Fiévé returned to Japan to work again in Katō’s research unit where he remained for the following five years. In 1989, Nicolas Fiévé completed his Master’s thesis on the architecture of tea houses and obtained his Master’s degree in Japanese Studies at University Paris VII. He pursued his doctorate studies within Katō’s research group at the Department of Architecture, Engineering Faculty of the University of Kyōto (1990-93), and, under the supervision of Jacqueline Pigeot, began writing his thesis (in French) on the elite classes during the Ashikaga shoguns. During this period he attended Professor Katō’s lectures on major Japanese works pertaining to Japanese aesthetics and architecture, such as Masuda Tomoya’s (Spiritual) Landscape of the House and Garden, Watsuji Tetsurō’s 和辻哲郎 (1889-1960) Fūdo and Kuki Shūzō’s 九鬼周造 (1848-1941) Structure of Iki. In 1990, he participated in the competition of the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris and was nominated project manager in designing the new center; this was his last project as an architect: thereafter his career is entirely devoted to anthropology and the history of Japanese architecture. At the time, he also worked at the Atelier Ryō run by the architect Kinoshita Ryōichi and participated in the complete survey of rural houses in the Shiga region.

Upon his return to France in 1993, Nicolas Fiévé obtained his PhD degree and title of Doctor in South East-Asian Studies specialized in Japanese Civilization and joined the CNRS as Director of Research. He was first appointed to the Institut d’Asie Orientale in Lyon for three years before becoming a member of the Collège de France’s Japanese Civilization research team, where he continues to work alongside several of his former professors: Paul Akamatsu, Francine Hérail, Jacqueline Pigeot, Jean-Noël Robert, Jean-Jacques Tschudin and Cécile Sakai. In 2006, the Japanese Civilization research team —founded as a joint research unit with the CNRS by the Collège de France professor Bernard Frank— merged with two other research units, the Chinese and Tibetan Civilizations Studies teams from the EPHE, to form the Far Eastern Civilizations research Centre (Centre de Recherche sur les Civilisations de l’Asie Orientale) or CRCAO (UMR 8155 of the CNRS in partnership with the EPHE, the Collège de France and Université Paris-Diderot). Actively involved in the creation of the CRCAO, Nicolas Fiévé was appointed the unit’s Deputy Director, working alongside the archaeologist and Sinologist Alain Thote (EPHE), from 2006 to 2010, and was nominated Director in January 2014.

In 2007, Nicolas Fiévé became a member of the History of the Modern and Contemporary World Section (Section 33) of the National Committee for Scientific Research and was also nominated Professor at the EPHE, Historical and Philological Sciences Department, where he initiated a program of lectures on the history of pre-modern Japan’s architecture and gardens—the first and only of its kind in Europe. Leaving purely urban studies aside for a while, he has resumed his work on the habitat of the Japanese elite, with a focus on architectural space in the retreats and retirement villas of Japan’s 17th century elite.