After early stints in the studios of Le Corbusier and Antonin Raymond, Maekawa began to articulate his own architectural language after establishing his own firm in 1935, maintaining a continuous tension between Japanese traditional design and European modernism throughout his career.

Firmly insistent that both civic and vernacular architecture should be rendered through a modernist lens appropriate to the contemporary lifestyle of the Japanese people, Maekawa's early work and competition entries consistently pushed back against the dominant Imperial Crown Style.

The two-story wood frame building featured a glass-clad facade facing the street, creating a stark visual and symbolic distinction between the bookshop and its surroundings, the latter of which still largely remained in states of ruin and disarray, dominated by the presence of black markets.

[7]: 39  The glass facade filled the flat-roofed building with natural light, while Japanese Ōya stone (a material famously featured in Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel) was used in the entryway and staircase.

[7]: 40–41  PREMOS produced approximately 1,000 units, which were made almost exclusively out of wood and mostly used as residences for coal miners in rural Japan, although a few were commissioned as private urban homes by clients and friends of Maekawa.

The houses were supported by L-shaped walls located at the corners of the home, had no columns, and used a collection of floor, ceiling, and partition panels that were all manufactured in the factory before being sent to the building site, where they could be fully constructed within a week.

[7]: 41  Though PREMOS never reached widespread success owing largely to the actual expenses of the construction and the decline of coal mining in the late 1960s (an industry that had peaked during the U.S. occupation due to the operating needs of national industries, particularly steel), the modernist principles demonstrated in the project—combined dining and kitchen spaces, the Western-style living room, the flat-roofed structure, and the mass-production methods—emblematized the flux of the postwar years and allowed Maekawa to test out ideas borrowed from his time working with European architects within a Japanese context.

The upturned eaves are reminiscent of Le Corbusier's Notre-Dame du Haut, while the wooden acoustic panels of the 2,300-seat main auditorium feature organic, cloud-like forms, counterbalancing the heft and linearity of the concrete details.

In contrast to his younger colleagues such as Kenzō Tange and those associated with the Metabolism movement, Maekawa displayed a reticence towards the megastructures and biomorphic forms that approached the rapid growth of technological modernity with exuberance, and expressed concerns over the capacity of machines to undermine human skill and artistry in architectural labor.

[10] At the same time, he maintained a consistently apolitical stance throughout the course of his career, in contrast to both his mentor Le Corbusier and other contemporaries in Japan—a decision that was surely driven by personal choice, but as Jonathan Reynolds suggests, also allowed him to remain in the good graces of the academy, authorities and other stakeholders who continued to provide him with large-scale commissions that played a central role in the transformation of urban landscapes in postwar Japan.

[12] As industrialization and economic growth progressed rapidly and urban centers swelled in size throughout the 1960s, the Tokyo skyline became increasingly punctuated by high-rise skyscrapers that signified the onset of a new postwar era.

In 1948, however, the bikan chiku system was suspended after its purposes were deemed unnecessary with the onset of the Building Standards Act (municipalities could later pursue this designation provided they establish a separate ordinance specific to their area).

The widely publicized back-and-forth surrounding the construction created what was termed the "aesthetics debate" (bikan ronso) as politicians, architects, and planners engaged in heated discourse over the symbolic and visual stakes of the proposed building.

[13]: 5  No significant changes to the appearance of the building were made, as Maekawa's design consisted of two rectangular volumes, flat on all sides, with modular windows across the entirety of the facade, making the process of removing floors a relatively simple revision.

Nevertheless, the building and the ensuing debate transformed the discourse surrounding urbanization, economic growth, and aesthetics in the Japanese city, setting the stage for the dozens of skyscrapers that would be constructed in the decades to follow.