MIT Press (MA) 2006 Hardcover Used-Very Good Japanese architect Arata Isozaki sees buildings not as dead objects butas events that encompass the social and historical context--not to be definedforever by their 'everlasting materiality' but as texts to be interpreted and rereadcontinually. In Japan-ness in Architecture, he identifies what is essentiallyJapanese in architecture from the seventh to the twentieth century. In the openingessay, Isozaki analyzes the struggles of modern Japanese architects, includinghimself, to create something uniquely Japanese out of modernity. He then circlesback in history to find what he calls Japan-ness in the seventh-century Ise shrine, reconstruction of the twelfth-century Todai-ji Temple, and the seventeenth-centuryKatsura Imperial Villa. He finds the periodic ritual relocation of Ise's precincts acounter to the West's concept of architectural permanence, and the repetition of theritual an alternative to modernity's anxious quest for origins. He traces the'constructive power' of the Todai-ji Temple to the vision of the director of itsreconstruction, the monk Chogen, whose imaginative power he sees as corresponding tothe revolutionary turmoil of the times. The Katsura Imperial Villa, with itschimerical spaces, achieved its own Japan-ness as it reinvented the traditionalshoin style. And yet, writes Isozaki, what others consider to be the Japaneseaesthetic is often the opposite of that essential Japan-ness born in moments ofhistoric ...

The MIT Press, Date: 2006-06-16. Hardcover. Good. 2006. The MIT Press ISBN 0262090384 9780262090384 [US]