The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture: From the Founders to Shinohara and Isozaki
David B. Stewart
Kodansha International, 2003

Paperback | 8-1/2 x 11-1/4 inches | 304 pages | 356 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9784770029331 | $50.00

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
The year 1988 commemorated the fourth generation since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 defined Japan's position-political, economic, and cultural-in the modern world. This period of history, which witnessed the rise, defeat, and rebirth of contemporary Japan, has been widely written about. Nevertheless, there remains, in the realm of architecture, an intractable gap in our knowledge of this span of more than a century. It is precisely that breach which Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture(with its more than 400 illustrations) undertakes to repair. It brilliantly charts the course of the art of building in this very old and yet, in a sense, quite new country from the middle of the nineteenth century to the onset of the 1980s.  The book successfully sets before the reader, and illustrates in striking manner, the sea change that Japan's architecture underwent as feudal customs and an intense preoccupation with beauty encountered industrialization and modern lifestyles. By what means, then, was the switch-over made from homes of paper and wood to efficient urban complexes of earthquake-proof reinforced concrete" The answer, during the Meiji era, was gaslighting and brick, followed in the second and thi...