His recently finished building, Gushikawa Orchid Center in Okinawa, Japan has been awarded with SD Review Award (1998) and Nikkei Kyushyu District New Office Award (1999).
He leads the project Unbuilt Monuments, in which his team is developing computer graphics visualization of significant but unrealized early modern architecture, including the Danteum (Terragni and Lingeri, 1938), the Palace of Soviets (Le Corbusier, 1931) and the Monuments for the Third International (Tatlin, 1919). Its recent video productions have been exhibited in Tokyo, Osaka, Orlando, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Charlottesville, Paris, Milan and Florence in film festivals and computer graphics conferences such as SIGGRAPH Animation Theaters of 1998 and 1999.
Inspired by the perspective apparatus Albrecht Durer documented in 1525, he invented Digitarama, a computer based space-form projection machine, developed for the Virtual Architecture Show at Tokyo University Digital Museum in June 1997. Its portable version, Deskrama, has been patented (in collaboration with Jun Oishi), and used in architectural exhibitions as well as in model rooms of housing projects in Japan.
His Ph.D. dissertation (1996) at Harvard University proposed a computable paradigm for representing architectural shapes and transformations. This opened up a possibility of new type of intelligent software that can help developing architectural design by recognizing shapes and transforming them in drawings. NITROS, its prototype CLOS implementation with Internet-based knowledge distribution system is in progress under his project Metamorphica.
He is the co-author of Gendai Kenchiku no Hassou (Ideas in Contemporary Architecture)(Maruzen, 1989) and translated William J. Mitchell's the Logic of Architecture (MIT Press, 1990) into Japanese (Kajima, 1991). His essays include "Shape Recognition and Transformation" in the Electronic Design Studio, edited by William J. Mitchell, Patrick Purcell and Malcolm McCullough (MIT Press, 1990). The result of his past MIT studio courses in electronic design environment is summarized in a co-authored article, "Digital Pinup Board -- The Story of the Virtual Village Project" in Virtual Design Studio, edited by Jerzy Wojtowicz (Hong Kong Press, 1995).
Before coming to MIT in 1993, Nagakura worked for Fumihiko Maki in Tokyo, and was an instructor at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design. He earned Bachelor of Engineering in Architecture from Tokyo University in 1985, Master of Architecture from Harvard University in 1987, Master of Engineering in Architecture from Tokyo University in 1988, and completed his PhD at Harvard in 1996. In 1985 he received the prestigious Ishizaka Memorial Foundation scholarship from the Japanese Federation of Economic Institutions. He is the recipient of the Japan Information Culture Society Grand Prize in 1999.