Though the architect Le Corbusier learned a lot from Japan, he could not have been thinking of this country when he wrote his well-known dictum: "A house is a machine for living in."
This is because of all national architectures, the Japanese is traditionally the most organic, the one that listened least to the hubris of the machine age.
Perhaps the French architect was merely rephrasing the better-known passage in Tolstoy which maintains that "our body is a machine for living, it is organized for that, it is its nature." Even so, this emphasis on function ignores the effects of many architectures.
Certainly such a statement ignores Japanese domestic architecture, which originally (never mind now) insisted upon a symbiosis, a blending of the building with its setting, a kind of interpenetration that welcomed wholeness and discouraged exclusion.
Ideally the door was the window, the wall was the roof, the garden came into the house and the house entered into the garden.
There were many reasons for this kind of architecture, one that fit the body like a well-cut kimono.
Kiyoshi Seike, author of one of the better accounts, lists (along with climate and prior building conditions) the materials themselves and the way that construction was entrusted not to architects, with their often metaphysical world views, but to carpenters with their concern for the wood, straw, clay or stone that they used, and the ways these materials could be crafted.
This is the approach chosen by Alexandra Black in her text for this thoughtful and beautiful book on Japanese houses. She begins with sections on tatami, bamboo, paper, wood and stone, and only after they and their uses are described does she indicate how their qualities create the traditional dwelling.
Her examples are highly eclectic and quite fitting. She uses no museum-like pieces: All her houses are also homes, and so we may view their organic qualities the better.
She and photographer Noboru Murata have chosen 15 structures and used these to illustrate the thesis that Japanese traditional domestic architecture fits human nature as have few others.
Included is the Kansuien teahouse at the Mushakoji Senke school; the Kyoto town house of Sotetsu Nakamura, the lacquer artist; the 1899 structure restored by the Kyoto Machiya Preservation Committee; Kiyo and Douglas Woodruff's country house; the Kinamata inn in Kyoto; the samurai dwelling restored by John McGee and Alexandre Avdulov; the thatched farmhouse restored by Hiroyuki and Chikako Shindo, crafters in indigo; and the reconstructed farmhouse of Yoshihiro Takishita in Kamakura.
Nor are the examples only from the past. Included is the Hakone house that Eizo Shiina made for fashion designer Yukiko Hanai; a Shiina-designed private house using Heian-Period principles; and a striking Imperial villa (now privately owned) in Kyoto that was built in the early 1930s for one of the Imperial princes and incorporates Art Deco. The combination is both striking and satisfying, for, as Black says, in both traditional Japanese aesthetics and the impulses behind Art Deco there is a "strong sense of spatial unity and awareness and the impulse to incorporate art into daily life, especially home life."
The book is so beautiful, the photos so accomplished, the text so right, that the viewer feels both nostalgia and indignation that such rightness and such comeliness is now rarely encountered in architecture. A glance out the window will indicate that this is so, and a perusal of this fine book reveals that it is only a handful of concerned people (many of them foreigners) who keep Japanese traditional domestic architecture alive.
That the result is a bit museum-like is unavoidable, as is the suggestion of gentrification that attentive reconstruction always brings.
Nonetheless, in this age where tatami is a thing of the past, where plastic has taken over paper, and where wood is so expensive that wood-textured photographic paper is pasted over composition board, it is good to have this gracious reminder of something that once belonged to all of us.
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