This big, beautiful, well-designed book tells and shows how new building techniques are changing the look and feel of Japanese housing. Gone are the days of the rabbit-hutch. For those who can afford it, the new prefab home is spacious, comfortable, even elegant -- as well as somehow Japanese.
The "shisutemu jyutaku," or "system-built house," was first seen here in the mid-1950s and echoed similar American experiments -- particularly those of Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago and Milwaukee. Later there was Levittown, uniform and not very elegant, and even later the ubiquitous Quonset hut.
When Japan got around to standardizing system-built techniques, enough work had been done that those primitive beginnings could be discarded and basic ideas could be adapted to Japanese needs.
Of course, these too were changing. The traditional roof was out of the question (fire department regulations) and the "doma" sunken kitchen area was impractical. Contemporary production methods were making tatami obsolete and such features as the "tokonoma" alcove were slowly disappearing as well.
It is common now in ordinary apartment houses (though not in the system-built house) to find no tatami at all; in one that I looked at several years ago what would have been the tokonoma was occupied by the hot-water geyser. In fact, the ordinary Japanese apartment is Japanese only in that it happens to have been built here.
In contrast, the system-built house looks for new ways to retain tradition. This is the theme of Azby Brown's text. A practicing architect himself and author of both "The Genius of Japanese Carpentry" and "Small Spaces," he progresses from a discussion of cultural backgrounds to a closer examination of the specific design features that represent the current state of home-building.
The place of the system-built home manufacturers (who use prefabrication techniques to construct sections of the house in factories and them assemble them on site) is examined and the ways in which traditional ideas are retained is explained.
All of this is illustrated with a wealth of images, much of the historical material (some of it never before reprinted) from the archives of the Mainichi Shimbun. The book itself is beautifully designed by Joseph Cali who has worked widely in the fields of graphic design, interior design and illustration. The contemporary photos (from various sources, all listed in the back papers) have been laid out in a manner that provides a second narrative as well -- one to follow the text and another to show how everything is done.
A snow-filled view of a bright and warm house is big on the double page, while in the corner is shown a factory where a miniature version is being tested with artificial snow. The old way of pile-driving and scaffolding is contrasted on the same page with a nine-panel process series illustrating how the system-built installation, this one composed of high-strength ceramic modules, begins at eight in the morning and is finished by four: In eight hours, a fully-formed traditional-looking Japanese house is standing.
Though the publication of this book is supported by Misawa Homes, that company and its work is mentioned only in passing, and all of its competitors in the system-built field are also mentioned, though again only in passing. This book is thus definitely not an illustrated catalog disguised as a book, despite the commercial intentions of the title -- a publisher's attempt to sell the book, not the house. Rather, it is just what the subtitle says it is.
It is a thoughtful and beautifully realized essay on one of the ways in which the traditional manages to survive in our untraditional times.
Though Japan has changed so enormously in the past 50 years that almost nothing remains except that which is gentrified, there still exists much from before. Ways of thought, diet, speech patterns, a general tendency toward a particular disposition of space -- these somehow maintain.
This book follows that narrative thread and shows us some of the later extensions in domestic architecture.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.