architecture thesis japan

• DSpace@MIT Home
• MIT Libraries
• Graduate Theses

Process of designing city housing in Japan

Alternative title

Other contributors, terms of use, description, date issued, collections.

Modernism and Tradition in Japanese Architectural Ideology, 1931-1955

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Download Free PDF

The Architecture of Japan: Discovery, Assimilation and Creation—Josiah Conder Opens the Way

Ever since the opening of Japan in 1853, the archipelago’s pre-modern wooden architecture has fascinated Western designers. The British architect Josiah Conder (1852–1920) was hired as architecture professor at Tōkyō Kōbu Daigakkō Imperial College from 1876 until 1884. He identified this architecture’s specificities and opened the way to a Japanese modern architecture with his pioneering teaching, writings and realisations. The cultural collision with the West and the modernisation process lead thus in the first place to a creative period of selection and assimilation of these Japanese pre-modern architecture specificities – balanced consonance of ornamentation, miniaturisation, asymmetry, performative design and indirect light. We discuss here four major levels defining this assimilation’s process: replication, citation, adaptation and abstraction. Architectural creations born from Japanese architecture and art’s revelation include a range spanning from borrowed elements typical of Japonisme, to abstract designs erasing the original source of inspiration.

Related papers

During the last two centuries the field of Architectural design in Japan has been fascinating worldwide architects, designers and students. Aesthetic elegance, functional pragmatism, technological sophistication or precision in craft, are just some of the concepts that describe the notable work realized in this country. Between 1603 and 1868, Japan suffered an isolation period, imposed by the Tokugawa shogunate, for almost two hundred years. During this time Japan was closed to trade which meant that its architecture did not have any influence from abroad. The first foreign architects that arrived to Japan in the end of the isolation period, late 19th century, got lost with its unique architectural design quality. In fact, the unawareness of the outside world resulted in a self-directed architecture, with a special character, eventually influencing the Japanese architecture that we know today. The study starts with a brief overview of Japan’s history and a contextualization of its architecture. In order to understand the Japanese architectural design, we study the life and work of three renown architects born in the second half of the 19th century, Josiah Conder, Bruno Taut and Frank Lloyd Wright, who either had an impact on Japanese architecture, or were influenced by it. The cultural values in Japan are also studied in the first part of the dissertation which represent a fundament for the interpretations and conclusions. In addition, the trip to Japan, for approximately one month, and the interviews made to Kengo Kuma and Sou Fujimoto, frequently referenced through the study, allow a closer look of the present situation of Japan’s architectural design. Furthermore, the life and work of four leading Japanese architecture practices of today (Tadao Ando, SANAA, Kengo Kuma and Sou Fujimoto) are studied, with the objective of finding a relation between the traditional and contemporary architecture and reflect upon the path of future generations. This work results, therefore, in a reflection about the past, present and future of architectural design in Japan. Although it has changed a lot during the last centuries, there are three essential concepts that have persisted through time: Simplicity, Spirituality and Comfort.

Genealogies often sprout to the extent of becoming mythologies. For Japanese architecture, the narratives of its rediscovery through the Western eye in diverse periods of its history have legitimized as much as mythicized its current international recognition.

The Hypospace of Japanese Architecture, 2023

The Hypospace of Japanese Architecture traces back to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 the pathways taken by Japanese architects since 1945. Pushing past clichés of exotica, the book defamiliarizes our notions of Japan by unpacking the polysemy of a country whose history of importing foreign ideas is less about assimilation than transformation, less a process of indigenization than one of cultural invention. Case studies of influential works, consequential events, and critical debates excavate the reasons why Japanese architects have grounded their work in the principle articulated in traditional thought and modern science alike that space and time are interdependent and coexistent phenomena. The possibility that buildings are dynamic events of space-in-time, rather than inert objects outside time, informs the continuing relevance of Japanese architecture and suggests how we might rethink the history, theory, and practice of architecture more generally.

Umění (Art), 2019

Emerging European Modernist architecture in the 1920s and 1930s apparently shared certain principles with Japanese traditional building: The construction principles and aesthetic qualities that Modernism strove for – ‘asymmetrical plan’, ‘flexibility of the interior space’, ‘modularity,’ ‘naked materials,’ seemed to have existed in Japan for hundreds of years. Writers such as Tetsurō Yoshida in The Japanese House and Garden, published 1935 in German, emphasised these similarities and presented the Japanese tradition in a distinctly Modernist manner. After World War II as Modernism became dominant in the West Japanese traditional building became a prominent and lively subject of the architectural discourse. We can follow this in the architectural press, which is also the main source of this research. The wave of interest culminated between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s. But why exactly was Japan so attractive for European architects at this particular time? Were Japanese traditional principles an object of a purposeful misreading? And, more generally, what significance did this encounter have for Modern architecture in the West? The essay first brings an introduction to the phenomenon and pinpoints the important moments in its development. It then looks closer at the way European architects interpreted Japan and its relationship to the current development of Modern architecture, namely on the ambiguous role of history in this discourse. Within a broader comparison of concurrent ideas on Japan, the main focus is on the writings of Erwin A. Gutkind, Walter Gropius, and Bernard Rudofsky. Finally, the essay suggests an interpretation: Did the Japanese tradition serve as a ‘prosthetic history’ of Modernism?

Conference proceedings, "Why Does Modernism Refuse to Die?", 2002

Any discussion of the survival and re-birth of Modern architecture begs the question “what is Modernism?”, a question problematic enough in itself. Yet when we consider Modernism’s pervasiveness in non-Western countries the question becomes much more challenging. It demands consideration of its social corollary: the more fundamental query of “what is Modernity?” This paper will attempt to illustrate, with reference to traditional and contemporary Japanese architecture, how a number of qualities of Japanese society and culture problematize our definitions of these terms. A rethinking of our preconceptions of Modernity and Modernism can suggest how it might be that Modernism is still with us when so many of the values on which it is based – values of Modernity – have been called into question.

This paper considers Charlotte Perriand’s stay in Japan as a Government official designer advisor between 1940 and 1941. Firstly, we compare Japanese architectural principles observed in her travel diaries with those of her five articles edited in France from 1946 to 1950. Secondly we investigate C. Perriand’s designs after Japan. Case studies are the Ambassador’s Residence (1968) and the Tea-house UNESCO (1993) in Paris. Our findings are constituted by recent study (2006) of C. Perriand archives in Paris and bibliographic researches. C. Perriand (1903 – 1998) works at Le Corbusier’s Atelier de Sèvres in Paris from 1927 until her first departure to Japan, in June 1940. There is no evidence that French architects have any other knowledge of Japanese architecture than descriptions from Mallet Stevens and B. Taut . At Sèvres, C. Perriand works with K. Maekawa (1928 – 30) and J. Sakakura (1931 – 36). She reads Okakura’s famous book of Tea , a copy given to her by J. Sakakura. C. Perriand’s mission in 1940 is to give a report to the Japanese Government about industrial design potential for the production of new objects and furniture to be exported to Europe. Therefore, she visits craftsmen, museums and sites all through Japan and proposes an exhibition in Tokyo to be open in spring 1941, entitled Tradition, Selection, Creation. C. Perriand selects traditional Japanese crafts and shows them with her new creations for a western and eastern living style. She observes several similarities between traditional Japanese architectural principles and modern European architecture such as standardization, modularity and space flexibility. Beside, she finds in Japan other design strategies such as the use of screens, the disposition of filters between exterior and interior, the concept of integrated equipment and mobile furniture. C. Perriand is convinced by the modernity of the traditional Japanese house and proposes it as prototype for western dwellings.

Published in World Art 5, no. 1 (spring 2015). This article examines the discussions on tradition in art, design, and architecture in the 1950s Japan. It first explores the historical background of the discussions among artists, architects and art historians from the nineteenth century to the Second World War. The article insists that they attached to Japanese traditions various meanings and values including what should be overcome in the process of Westernization, the roots to which Japanese people felt compelled to return in the age of modernity, and the sophisticated sensibility of the Japanese comparable to Western modern aesthetics. The article then investigates the postwar situations. Following European artists’ interest in primitivism, avant-garde artist Okamoto Tarō advocated tradition to make it function as a key factor in the dynamism of the cultural order. Although discussions were not developed and deepened among designers, tradition was actively discussed in a field of architecture. Architects like Tange Kenzō and Shirai Seiichi elevated the tradition debate into the ideological issue, extracting the dichotomy of the Jōmon and the Yayoi and applying them to actual buildings and houses. The tradition debate in architecture meant a new departure in the postwar period, creating important discussions and movements on historical consciousness in the later period, such as the Metabolist movement in the 1960s and the ‘Ma: Space/Time in Japan’ exhibition in 1978. In this sense, the tradition conceived in the 1950s Japan is best regarded as posthistorical.

There is a widespread consensus among architectural historians that the cultural and aesthetic revolution carried out by the avant-garde artistic currents at the end of the nineteenth century is a strictly Western issue. 'Western' means European culture of Greco-Roman derivation. Nevertheless, it is probably safe to say that when Westerners arrived in Japan during the Meiji Restoration era (1868-1889), Japan was already a 'modern' country. Western thought originated from the ontology of Being and metaphysical thought. In an antithetical way, the East has built its culture on a perception of reality that is less theoretical and more pragmatic. One culture has sought dualism and domination over nature, the other one, integration with it, and has considered dualities complementary terms. These differences have determined divergent aesthetic and formal outcomes. In the figurative arts, the contamination has occurred with greater force than in architecture because European architects found in Japan the exact characteristics of absoluteness they sought in modernity, though reluctant to admit it. Despite this, because of contingent and synchronic circumstances between Japan's opening to the West and European society's disquiet in the nineteenth century, when the avant-gardes artists met the Japoneries, they were fascinated and surprised.

Vincenzo Cataldo, 2023

Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics 13:2 (2019), 1-15., 2019

Platform №12, May 2024, pp. 38-46 https://wap21.org/?p=4840 , 2024

Synthese, 2022

Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 2013

Scottish Journal of Theology, 2023

Anais do Museu Paulista: História e Cultura Material, 2023

Journal of Researches in Linguistics, 2024

Near Eastern Archaeology, 2018

Communications - Scientific letters of the University of Zilina, 2008

Diakonian tutkimus, 2024

Kuantum Mantığı Aşabilir mi?, 2023

World Journal of Cardiovascular Diseases, 2020

Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics, 2018

Annals of Surgical Oncology, 2009

Hip International, 2018

Journal of the American Chemical Society, 1998

Bioengineering, 2024

Aşk ile Çalışan Yorulmaz: Ali Akyıldız Armağan-I, 2024

Alteritas, 2021

Related topics

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Japanese cultural center

Major Professor

Committee member, journal title, journal issn, volume title.

This thesis investigates the principles underlying traditional Japanese architecture and landscape design and proposes the ways by which these principles can be applied to design in a modern context. To give a clear picture and understanding of these principles, the thesis starts with a brief review of the historical and cultural background of Japan followed by literature research of traditional Japanese architecture and landscape. Further, the thesis provides case studies of modern architects who have applied these principles in design. Lastly taking the literature review as a basis, the thesis proposes a design for a Japanese Cultural Center in Shenandoah Valley, Virginia incorporating the principles of traditional Japanese architecture and landscape design in a modern context.

Series Number

Journal issue, is version of, academic or administrative unit, rights statement, permanent link, supplemental resources, collections.