We are grateful to have borrowed our studio name from Junichiro Tanizaki’s book In Praise of Shadows. We appreciate his fine descriptions of architectonic values that, to us, are fundamental, as well as his humoristic play with the meaning and responsibility of tradition and architecture. We discovered the book when we were teaching together and thus the name of our office has also become an important constant reminder of where we come from and that architecture is about putting a sustainable and responsible shadow on the surface of the earth.