their usage, introduce several overarching frameworks to help make sense of Japan’s wide variety of design principles, and offer a visual primer of contemporary arts that encapsulate the principles of these terms.
Plate 1-1 Butterfly Stool, 1956. Designed by Yanagi Sōri (1915–2011); manufactured by Tendo Mokko Co., Tendo, Japan. Plywood, rosewood, and brass, 37.9 x 42.9 x 31.8 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum. Gift of Denis Gallion and Daniel Morris, 82: 1994. This iconic stool epitomizes the melding of East and West design sensibilities in the early post-war years. The stool form and its material (bentwood plywood) are Western in derivation but the elegant, arching shape derives from a Japanese proclivity for fluid, playful forms. Its designer, Yanagi Sōri, was the son of Yanagi Sōetsu (see page 138), founder of the mingei movement. Like his father, he championed the beauty of functional, everyday objects.
Plate 1-2 Soy sauce container, 1958. Designed by Mori Masahiro (b. 1927); manufactured by Hakusan Porcelain Company, Hasami-machi, Nagasaki, Japan. Glazed porcelain, height 8 cm. Although a traditionally trained potter, Mori, in 1956, joined Hakusan Co. and embarked on a career that revolutionized the design of functional, mass-produced tableware.3 This classic soy sauce container, with its clean lines and graceful shape, remains in production today.
Plate 1-3 International House of Japan, Tokyo, Japan. Designed by Maekawa Kunio (1905–1986), Sakakura Junzō (1901– 1969), and Yoshimura Junzō (1908–1997); originally completed in 1955; expanded in 1976 using Maekawa’s design; extensively restored and updated in 2005 by Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei Inc. Photo courtesy of the International House of Japan. The adjacent garden, which predates the building, was completed in 1929 by famed Kyoto garden designer Ogawa Jihei VII (1860–1933), also known as Ueji, for the building that formerly sat on the site, a Japanese-style mansion built by samurai feudal lords of the Kyogoku clan. The 1955 building, although constructed of modern materials, was designed, in the spirit of pre-modern Japanese residences to harmonize with its garden. One of its most unusual features is its “green” rooftop, plantings that integrate the garden and the building.
KATSURA
REFINED RUSTICITY IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
The Katsura Imperial Villa, near Kyoto, provides an excellent path into an understanding of principles of Japanese design. It is widely regarded as the quintessential embodiment of the culture’s highly refined and understated aesthetic sensibility. The buildings and surrounding grounds radiate a quiet, graceful presence that demonstrates how attuned the Japanese are to the beauty of nature, and how they are able to transform that beauty to their own purposes. Its finely constructed parts reveal the Japanese artisans’ careful attention to detail and sensitive, but calculated, use of natural materials. The complex was built over a fifty-year period by two princes of the Hachijō family, Toshihito (1579–1629) and his son Toshitada (1619–1662), son and grandson of an emperor and advisors to the then current imperial monarch. Toshitada’s marriage into the wealthy and powerful Maeda warrior clan enabled him to continue improving the estate after his father’s death. Katsura consists of a series of interconnected residential buildings in a formal style called shoin (literally “study hall”), originally a chamber designed as a study or lecture hall in a temple or private mansion that by the early seventeenth century had evolved into a formal reception room in a great house (Plates 1-6, 3-16), and several detached tea houses in an informal style known as sukiya (literally “the abode of refinement”), a small, private place for contemplation and participation in the chanoyu tea ceremony (Plates 1-5 a & b). The buildings were all sited within a beautifully manicured Japanese stroll garden. Katsura is the culmination of a style of residential retreat first constructed in the late fourteenth century by samurai rulers and aristocrats (the Kinkakuji Pavilion, Plate 3-31, is a forerunner), and though it was not the last such abode to be erected (another example is the Rikugien Garden, Plate 3-14), it is undoubtedly the finest and the best preserved because of its association with the imperial court.
Plate 1-4 Central gate at the Katsura Imperial Villa, complex completed ca. 1663. Photo: David M. Dunfield, December 2007. The rustic rush and bamboo fence that leads to a humble looking thatched gate was probably once the compound’s main entrance.
Beginning in the 1930s, both Japanese and foreign architects who adopted modernist design principles began to appreciate traditional Japanese residential design. Publications and lectures at that time by Bruno Taut (1880–1938; see page 130) promoted it as the archetype of traditional Japanese residential architectural design. These architects particularly admired the flexibility and compactness of its spaces, the finely crafted details and structural elements made from natural materials, the modular design of building parts, the integral relationships between the buildings’ forms and their structures and between the buildings and surrounding gardens.
It was not until the immediate post-war period, however, that appreciation for Katsura truly took hold, largely through photographs in a seminal English language publication of 1960, jointly authored by architects Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and Tange Kenzō (1913–2005).4 The book features beautiful, and now iconic, black and white photographs taken in 1953 by American-born photographer, Ishimoto Yasuhiro (1921–2012). These images interpreted Katsura in abstract geometric forms fitting the authors’ modernist ideology. Tange famously cropped them to suit his architectural vision.5 Ishimoto first visited Katsura in 1953 when he was accompanying Arthur Drexler (1926–1987), architect and long-time curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on a fact-finding trip to Japan in preparation for a landmark exhibition of Japanese architecture at MoMA in 1955. For that exhibition, Yoshimura Junzō, one of the architects of the International House of Japan, who accompanied Ishimoto and Drexler to Katsura, was commissioned to design a traditional Japanese residential building for MoMA’s courtyard (the building, Shofuso, now resides in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park), funded by John D. Rockefeller, III.
Plate 1-5 a & b Interior and exterior views of the Shokintei Teahouse at the Katsura Imperial Villa, complex completed ca. 1663. Photograph above © amasann/photolibrary.jp. Photograph below © Sam Dcruz/Shutterstock.com. This structure is a classic example of the sukiya shoin architectural style.
Plate 1-6 Moon viewing platform of the old shoin buildings at the Katsura Imperial Villa, complex completed ca. 1663. Photograph © shalion/photolibrary.jp. The moon viewing platform in the foreground extends from the open veranda to join the old shoin to the adjacent garden.
Katsura has continued to attract the interest of younger Japanese architects, and one of the profession’s post-war leaders, Isozaki Arata (b. 1931), a disciple of Tange, has authored two books on the subject. The first, published in Japanese in 1983 and in English translation in 1987, included new color photographs by Ishimoto that presented Katsura in a very different light.6
His more recent publication reassesses previous studies and includes reprints of major essays by Taut, Gropius, Tange, and others.7
