Tower of Yasaka, Kyoto, Shôwa period, dated 1958

The five-story pagoda of Yasaka—actually the Hokanji Temple pagoda, a Kyoto landmark visible from the Higashiyama hillside streets—was one of the city's most iconic silhouettes. Saito's 1958 rendering shows the pagoda in strict formal reduction: each tier a flat horizontal mass, the whole rising as a stacked sequence of geometric volumes against a sky of raw woodblock paper. The work demonstrates his conviction that architecture understood as geometry contained its own spiritual content.