Shoji Oshio is a Japanese architect. His career starts from the office of Kengo Kuma at the time of its establishment. He worked there for 13 years and did the office’s early major projects, including museum and exhibition designs. After the establishment of UA Architects, he continued to investigate exhibition space design for religious art while designing residential and commercial facilities at the same time. Buddhist temple Light Gallery / Interaction Gallery, which also serve as a contemporary art exhibition space, were designed at the time.

After that, through the works for restoration following the Great East Japan Earthquake and other earthquake disasters in Japan, he has become an expert on the design of “Place of Prayer”. His interest turned to how people relate to the object of faith, movement of body, and the surrounding natural environment through design. Through the design of many temples, cemeteries and tombs, he believes that incorporating environmental design into “place of prayer” can bring peace to people’s mind.

In the field of worship space design, Shoji Oshio has won Faith & Form’s Religious Art and Architecture Award (USA) for “Light Gallery / Interaction Gallery” (2009), “8 shaped Passage in Ueno” (2016) and “Tegami-dokoro” (2017); the Gold prize of Good Design Award (Japan) for “&(ando)”; iF Design Award (Germany) for the works of temple branding design, amongst many others.