Japanese Architecture: Wood, Tatami and Modern Masters

Japanese architecture is characterised by timber structures with posts and beams, large overhanging roofs, sliding walls, tatami mats and a close relation between house and garden. The tradition goes back over 1,300 years and lives on in modern architecture by Kenzo Tange, Tadao Ando and many more.

Facts

Wood, posts and eaves

Japan is a country of much forest and many earthquakes, and timber structures have been the natural solution. Houses are built with posts and beams joined without nails, with carpentry joints, and roofs with wide eaves that protect from rain and sun. The walls do not carry the roof; they can be sliding doors of paper, shoji, or heavier partitions, fusuma. That is why houses can open to the garden and rooms can be made larger or smaller.

Horyu-ji in Nara, built around the year 700 after a fire, is counted as the world’s oldest surviving wooden building. Five-storey pagodas have a central pillar, shinbashira, that lets the storeys sway independently of each other and so withstand earthquakes. Read about the interplay of nature and material in the guide to functionalism, which often drew on Japanese building.

Shrines, castles and tea houses

The Shinto shrine at Ise is rebuilt every twenty years, and the most recent round in 2013 was the sixty-second. Both the building and the craft are thus renewed ritually. Castles, such as Himeji of 1609, combine white plastered walls with curving roofs. Buddhist temples such as Byodo-in and sculpture such as the Great Buddha belong to the same world; see also Japanese art history.

The tea ceremony created a building type of its own, the tea house, in a simple style called sukiya. The master Sen no Rikyu built small tea houses of untreated wood and clay with a tiny entrance one has to crawl through. The rock garden Ryoan-ji in Kyoto, with fifteen stones in raked gravel, shows how the garden became a room for contemplation.

Katsura and the meeting with the West

The Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, from the seventeenth century, became a model for European modernists. The German architect Bruno Taut praised it in the 1930s, and Gropius visited it in 1954. They admired the pure modular order, in which all rooms are based on the dimensions of the tatami mat, and the movement between inner and outer space. See Katsura, the byobu screen and the chochin lantern in the design section. Frank Lloyd Wright had in turn been inspired by Japanese woodwork and built the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo; see the guide to Wright.

After the Meiji Restoration in 1868 Japan took up Western architecture, with brick and stone. But today’s largest buildings are nevertheless of concrete and steel, and a new relation to tradition thereby began. Read also about how Japanese ideas affected the West in the guide to Impressionism, where Japanese woodblock prints played a big part.

Tange, Ando and the present

Kenzo Tange united Japanese tradition and modernism. His Yoyogi National Gymnasium was built for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964: two curving roofs hung from steel cables over a concrete base, a form resembling a traditional temple roof but entirely modern. He also founded Metabolism, a movement that saw buildings as growing organisms. Read about the styles under post-war modernism and about Brutalism.

Tadao Ando, a trained boxer and self-taught as an architect, builds with smooth concrete and the light of nature. His Church of the Light in Ibaraki (1989) has a cross-shaped opening in a concrete wall. He builds calm spaces where water, wind and light take their place. The architect Kengo Kuma returns to wood, and SANAA has made light, transparent buildings; see contemporary architecture. Le Corbusier, whom Ando studied, and his Unité are another important model.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What are the Japanese sliding walls of paper called?