1-1 Architects   Japan   Just like its language, Japan’s real estate market and peculiar regulations can seem abstruse to Western eyes; but every now and then they produce works that, like a haiku, condense an enormous, boundless imagination in a minimal space. An example is

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Japan   After its successful run at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the traveling exhibition 'Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams' moves to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Tokyo. On view through 28 May, it is organized by a scenographic narrative de

SUO Style-A   Japan   This project aimed to revitalize Setonaikai National Park's Yashima area, a tourist destination that was popular in the 1970s but had since seen a decline in visitor numbers, owing to which many of the existing constructions were demolished and stric

Junya Ishigami + associates   Japan   In Ube, a city in Yamaguchi Prefecture, stands this cave house with a small restaurant included that was built for a chef. When the restaurant is closed, its dining area doubles as a family room and the owners’ children can do their homework there.

Ingenhoven Architects   Japan   The German office established in 1985 by Christoph Ingenhoven has completed two skyscrapers flanking Toranomon Hills Tower …

Nendo   Japan   Established in 2005 by Oki Sato, the multidisciplinary studio Nendo designed an archive in which to store its collection of products, furniture, and artworks, with a guesthouse attached. Using elongated box-shaped concrete structures that commonly go

Tadao Ando   Japan   After a long and fruitful career, Tadao Ando decided that it was time for him to make an altruistic contribution to Osaka, the city where he was raised and developed as an architect. Ando wanted to pay tribute to the children of Osaka, the next gener

Tadao Ando   Japan   Tokyo Midtown is the result of a long redevelopment project on the former site of the Defense Ministry in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. Constructed in a public park in the northwest part of this recovered area, this gallery for exhibitions on the t

Tadao Ando   Japan   This is a memorial hall for writer Ryotaro Shiba, a figure representative of postwar Japan. The curved pavilion is on a site adjacent to the garden of the writer’s own residence, located in a quiet residential area on the outskirts of Osaka. The buil

Tadao Ando   Japan   Ueno Park, a gift from the Imperial family to the city of Tokyo, is a large public space where several cultural institutions are located. One of them, the old Imperial Library, was transformed into a library for children. The old building has a pseud

Tadao Ando   Japan   The site is located in a historical park established in a deep green valley in Osakaʼs Minamikawachi district, well known in Japan as an area containing a cluster of kofun (mounded tombs). The stone arrangements of more than a hundred tombs remain in

Tadao Ando   Japan   The temple of Water, the main one of Ninnaji Shingon, the oldest branch of tantric Buddhism in Japan, rests on a hill with views over Osaka Bay. The project proposes a sensory experience, a shift from the ordinary world to the sacred space. The appro

Tadao Ando   Japan   The regeneration of Naoshima, a small island on Seto Inland Sea, is a cultural project that was launched in the second half of the 1980s. The first building within this initiative was Benesse House Museum, an ‘overnight stay’ museum that includes lod

Tadao Ando   Japan   island of Hokkaido, in northern Japan. On a plain surrounded by mountain ranges and a dense forest of beech trees and shrubs, the building comprises two superposed cubes, a rectangular artificial lake, and a long L-shaped wall enclosing the complex.

Tadao Ando   Japan   The site is located in a quiet residential district in Setagaya ward. It is a three-household residence for the client couple and their respective parents. While ensuring privacy and independence for each family, the housing plan allows the three hou

Tadao Ando   Japan   Shortly after completing Tomishima House, his first work, Tadao Ando bought the property to turn it into his atelier. The subsequent extensions were carried out in different phases, producing a discontinuous and labyrinthine space that is a long way

Tadao Ando   Japan   The site is located on a verdant slope in Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture. It is a house for a well-known Japanese fashion designer. Taking on the abundant nature of the local environment, and a program with a high degree of freedom, the project aimed to ge

Tadao Ando   Japan   A steep hill at the foot of Mount Rokko, facing south and with panoramic views from Osaka Bay all the way to the Port of Kobe, was the site chosen for this residential complex built over the course of two decades. In spite of having been completed i

Tadao Ando   Japan   The district of Sumiyoshi, a working class neighborhood of Osaka, is characterized by a dense urban fabric of row houses built with timber structural frames. The project consisted in demolishing one of those traditional buildings and replacing it wit

kurosawa kawaraten   Japan   On a small budget the Japanese firm kurosawa kawaraten has transformed a house in Ichihara, in Chiba Prefecture, into an office. The traditional timber construction has been given new life. Non-structural partitions that fragmented the interior space

Javier Villar Ruiz Happenstance Collective [HaCo]    Japan   This shop for UPI, a company that specializes in equipment and paraphernalia for mountaineering, hiking, and camping, is a work of Javier Villar Ruiz and Tomoki Yamasaki of Happenstance Collective [HaCo]. Blurring the limits between interior and exte

Tomohiro Hata Misato Takagi    Japan   The house, inspired by the townscape of overlapping roofs that blend into the mountain landscape, is blurred in several stacked volumes, pursuing an architecture of ‘small roofs’ to create terraces and different experiences of space.

Suzuko Yamada Architects   Japan   The project is designed to be easily extended, refurbished, and altered. With blurred contours, the steel bars serve as a prelude to the complex forest of timber beams and columns that fills the interiors, where these elements are mixed with books an

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The publishing house Siruela, which placed the philologist Irene Vallejo on the bestseller lists with her marvelous Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (a work based on her dissertation, which also brought her Spain’s National Essay

Located in the Toyosu area of Tokyo, teamLab Planets is a digital museum in which visitors are invited to enter large interactive installations where the boundaries between bodies and artworks are blurred. Since it opened in July 2018 the museum has

CNN   Oscar Holland   Junko Ogura   Designed in 1972 by architect Kisho Kurokawa, the Nakagin Capsule Tower stands as an emblematic example of metabolism architecture right in the heart of Tokyo, will be demolished on April 12, 2022. The decision ends years of uncertainty surrounding t

A symbol of Japanese metabolism, the Nakagin block of apartment capsules in Tokyo (1972), a work of Kisho Kurokawa, is a double tower with 140 prefabricated cubicles piled up around two vertical circulation shafts. Having much fallen into disrepair,

The opening ceremony for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo has taken place in the Japan National Stadium, a work of Kengo Kuma, which presents a sophisticated composition of timber trusses and vegetation in its galleries. Sport events mark our everyday

When the eyes of the world see the Olympic flame in the cauldron of the Japan National Stadium, many will look at the sophisticated branches of its timber trusses and the soothing foliage of its galleries, and recognize the material discipline and lo

Sou Fujimoto   Through Architecture, I like to create beautiful integrations between Nature and Artifacts between Inside and Outside between Small and Large between Street and Room between Old and New between Simplicity and Diversity between Ground and Sky between

Thomas Daniell   Sou Fujimoto is an anomaly in the Japanese architectural world. Though he graduated from the University of Tokyo – a prestigious institution, to be sure – he has never worked for another architect, and in Japan the office at which you apprentice is m

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Sou Fujimoto describes his haphazard architectures as ‘notes without staves,’ and trying to interpret his forms through conventional composition is a futile effort. Escaping both the cartesian grid of regularity and the hierarchical pyramids of subor

Among the many peculiarities of SANAA, the most important Japanese studio in the current international scene, one is its confederal structure, thanks to which its two founders work as a team but can also each carry out projects on a solo basis. In th

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects Perhaps to compensate for the demolition in 2014 of what was, up to that moment, the architects’ masterpiece – the American Folk Art Museum of New York –, in 2019 the Praemium Imperiale recognized the career of Wi

The Japanese Royal House and the Japan Art Association have given the Praemium Imperiale to the painter William Kentridge, the sculptor Mona Hatoum, the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, the actor Bando Tamasaburo, and the US husband-and-wife architects

Kengo Kuma   The writer Haruki Murakami, a friend of mine, has written that both short stories and novels are indispensable for him. He develops the ideas that he discovers during the process of writing short stories in order to write novels. And when he is writi

Manuel Blanco   In the world of fashion, luxury is the ultimate quality, but it must be understood that it is not possible to create a luxury brand ex novo. Luxury has two inseparable ingredients: brand tradition, centenarian in many cases, and the careful use today

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Monumental or minuscule, the oeuvre of Kengo Kuma could be described as pixelated craftsmanship. Its creative explosion, encompassing all scales and extending over four continents, is governed by a devotion to the material rigor of construction and t

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Perfection is route more than target. In the 16th century, the mystic St. Teresa of Ávila praised a life of poverty and humility in The Way of Perfection, and the same title served the writer Pío Baroja to express regenerationist concerns in the earl

The idea that architecture is a form of nature has become a maxim that the firm Junya Ishigami + Associates faithfully follows in its work, an oeuvre now enriched by the Botanical Garden Art Biotop: Water Garden in Tochigi, Japan. The singularity of

Arata Isozaki The Hyatt Foundation gave the Pritzker Prize in 2019 to Arata Isozaki, master of Japanese architecture and bridge between West and East. Born in 1941, Isozaki studied at the University of Tokyo, where he met Kenzo Tange, who was a ke

Wired   Michael Hardy   In 2011, A devastating tsunami crashed into the northeast coast of Japan, destroying entire villages, killing thousands and causing a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. In the wake of the disaster, the Japanese government implemen

The Hyatt Foundation has awarded the 2019 Pritzker Prize to Arata Isozaki, one of the masters of Japanese architecture, a bridge between the modernity imported from Europe on one hand, and eclectic international modernity on the other. Born in Oita i

Dead Inside   It was the largest hotel in Japan. It is located on a remote volcanic island, almost 300 km from Tokyo. No beaches, only divers will find something to do. Unfortunately, it was not sustainable for such a large hotel to remain open. Despite several at

The Tokyo firm founded and headed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, SANAA, recently opened the City of Culture of Tsuruoka, a small city on the northwest coast of Japan’s Honshu Island. Located close to an old samurai school, it is surrounded by g

David Chipperfield   Tokio  2021  
LIXIL Publishing   - 140 Pages 

William O. Gardner   Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction

Ramón Rodríguez Llera   Arquitecturas y paisajes del imaginario japonés. Del exotismo a la modernidad

Jesper Wachtmeister   Influencias y origen

Cathelijne Nuijsink   Rotterdam  2012  
Nai010 Publishers   - 328 Pages 

Claudia Hildner   Contemporary Japanese Dwellings

Rem Koolhaas Hans Ulrich Obrist   Colonia  2011  
Taschen   - 720 Pages 

Where Art and Architecture Conspire with Nature

Naomi Pollock   London  2005  
Phaidon   - 240 Pages 

Arata Isozaki   Cambridge  2006  
MIT Press   - 349 Pages