REVIEW: New Architecture in Japan

Click image to visit Hennessey + Ingalls BookstoreNew Architecture in Japan
by Yuki Sumner and Naomi Pollock
Photography by Edmund Sumner
(Merrell, $49.95)

Outsiders have the sharpest appreciation of the contradictions of Japan, and this selection of a hundred recent buildings focuses on radical alternatives to a prevailing conformity. A British photographer traveled extensively with his Japanese wife, searching for exceptional work by mainstream architects and such mavericks as Atelier Bow-Wow, Shuhei Endo, and Terunobu Fujimori. Perceptive essays by Yuki Sumner and Naomi Pollock, an American architect who lives in Japan, seek to explain why innovation flourishes in a country that seems so uniform and banal to Western eyes.  Sumner traces the long history of deviance in Japan and the subtle ways that individuals can express their dreams. Pollock evokes the ephemeral urban context that is constantly renewing itself, rejecting the past in a quest for novelty. “Freed from the historical and aesthetic constraints facing their counterparts in the West, architects in Japan readily experiment with new structural systems, construction materials and geometrical solutions,” she asserts. Confronted by tough legal restrictions and deeply entrenched social conventions, the best architects “treat those limitations as catalysts for, not impediments to, good design” Many of the buildings shown here are hidden away or are located in remote areas that may take a day to reach, and that makes this colorful survey all the more valuable as a record of what lies off the radar.