Yoshinobu Ashihara (1918–2003) was a Japanese architect and writer on cities, best known for the Komazawa Olympic Gymnasium and the Sony Building in Tokyo. He studied at the University of Tokyo and at Harvard, where he took a master's degree in architecture in 1953, and then worked in the practice of the modernist Marcel Breuer. In 1956 he founded his own firm, Yoshinobu Ashihara Architecture Associates, and he later became professor of architecture at the University of Tokyo. He was president of the Japan Institute of Architects from 1980 to 1982 and of the Architectural Institute of Japan from 1985 to 1987, and he received the Order of Culture. His books The Aesthetic Townscape (1979) and The Hidden Order: Tokyo through the Twentieth Century (1986) were translated into English.
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For the 1964 Olympics he designed the Komazawa Olympic Park Control Tower and Gymnasium (1964), whose tower became the focal point of the park and whose gymnasium held the wrestling events. The Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre (1990), designed with the acousticians Nagata Acoustics, opened in October 1990, and the Okayama Symphony Hall (1991) followed with the same acoustic consultants.
