Midcentury modernism meets Japanese design in three revolutionary American buildings--the products of a unique, sustained, cross-cultural collaboration In 1953, Japanese architect Junzo Yoshimura designed a now-classic Japanese house and garden that he called Shofuso. It was built in Nagoya, Japan, and shipped to New York in 1954, where it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and then relocated to Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The curators of MoMA's House in the Garden exhibition highlighted its synthesis of historic Japanese architecture with modern architecture: the clarity of the house's post and beam structure, its flexibility of use and the close relationship of indoor and outdoor spaces. This extensively illustrated volume centers on Yoshimura's design for Shofuso and two allied sites located in New Hope, Bucks County, Pennsylvania: Raymond Farm (1939-41), a live-work residence built by Antonin and Noémi Raymond within the fabric of an existing 18th-century Quaker farmhouse; and Nakashima Studios, a complex of structures designed by George Nakashima over three decades (1947-77) to serve his furniture-making business and as his family's home. Each site, in its own way, is the embodiment of the personal relationships and cross-cultural collaborations among this group of architects and designers. The Raymonds, along with Yoshimura, Nakashima and others, came to understand Japan's changing environment through the act of building, through collaboration and travel. Together, they extended these lessons into the furniture and furnishings of modern living in both Japan and the United States. This volume documents an exhibition of objects and ephemera mounted at Shofuso. New York-based architectural photographer Elizabeth Felicella captures each site in a portfolio of newly commissioned images. Essays by Ken Tadashi Oshima and William Whitaker, illustrated with historical photographs, family snapshots and architectural drawings, further elucidate this important chapter in the history of modern architecture and design.

The traditional Japanese house is universally admired for its clean lines, intricate joinery, and unparalleled woodworking. The authors of this elegant volume, Peggy Landers Rao and Len Brackett, show how a classic Japanese- style house can be built to offer the warmth and comfort that modern homeowners require. Len Brackett, rigorously trained in traditional architecture in Kyoto, has spent decades adapting the ancient Japanese design aesthetic to Western needs. He builds traditional live-on-the-floor houses, as well as versions that accommodate furniture. Both types provide the essential features expected in today's new homes - central heating, insulation, weather stripping, thermal glazing, streamlined kitchens, computerized lighting systems, and the latest electronics. The book's primary focus is on a single guesthouse in California, but pictures of other adaptations of the traditional Japanese house in America exemplify various points. Architects will find reference charts of the prescribed set of proportions and dimensions normally passed down through a strict system of apprenticeship. anticipating shrinkage of various woods. A remarkable tool used to lay out precise joints is described in detail. Various sources are given for materials, including where to find a contemporary version of the distinctive, traditional earthen plaster.

With over 200 stunning photographs, this Japanese design and architecture book showcases some of the most beautiful homes in Japan. The pure beauty of Japanese architecture and design has inspired many of the world's top architects and designers. The grace and elegance of the Japanese sensibility is reflected in both modern and traditional Japanese homes, from their fluid floor plans to their use of natural materials. In The Japanese House, renowned Japanese photographer Noboru Murata has captured this Eastern spirit with hundreds of vivid color photographs of 15 Japanese homes. As we step behind the lens with Murata, we're witness to the unique Japanese aesthetic, to the simple proportions modeled after the square of the tatami mat; to refined, rustic decor; to earthy materials like wood, paper, straw, ceramics, and textiles. This is a glorious house-tour readers can return to again and again, for ideas, inspiration or simply admiration.

In the West, the Japanese house has reached iconic status in its architecture, decoration and style. Is this neat, carefully constructed version of Japanese life in fact a myth? Inge Daniels goes behind the doors of real Japanese homes to find out how highly private domestic lives are lived in Japan. The book examines every aspect of the home and daily life-from decoration, display, furniture and the tatami mat, to eating, sleeping, gift-giving, recycling and worship. For students and researchers in anthropology and architecture, The Japanese House re-evaluates contemporary Japanese life through an ethnographic lens, examining key topics of consumption, domesticity and the family. Highly illustrated throughout, the book will appeal to all who those are interested Japanese culture, and in how and why people live the way they do in modern Japan.

A remarkable classic work on traditional Japanese architecture and its general integrative quality, the order of space and form, the flexibility of partitions and room functions and other important or unique qualities. The author describes in detail, and with numerous architectural plans and drawings, the influence of the anatomy of the Japanese human body on traditional units of measurement and on house construction. This work is not simply a description of the features of the Japanese house, but "an invitation to probe the possibilities of utilizing this architectural achievement of the Japanese …in modern living and building," according to the author, who further believes that the unique features of the Japanese house are better suited to serve as a pattern for contemporary housing than any other form of residential structure.

The Japanese home has always attracted Western architects and designers. With a panache that often borders on the outrageous, modern homes in Japan blend such traditional elements as shoji screens and tatami-matted rooms with what appears, at first glance, to be the thoroughly contemporary elements of the Western home. And yet a closer scrutiny reveals impressively subtle touches. Carefully crafted wooden surfaces throughout the home gleam with a delicate Japanese sense of color and rhythm. The kitchen and living areas are outfitted with modern appliances or furniture, yet the subtle variations in the wall placement and space usage suggest that a different sensibility is at work here. Azby Brown, in his third book on the architecture of Japan, delves into the intricacies of the modern Japanese home by first reaching back some thousand years to its roots to follow its development to the present day. He then steams ahead to explore the state-of-the art Japanese home, with its recycled materials, extruded 30-foot-long woodlike stairway handrails, and dozens of other unique touches. In page after page of this lushly illustrated, full-color volume, Brown presents his take on Japan's ultra-chic, high-tech yet serene home designs. The Japanese Dream House is one of the first English-language books to appear on the subject and is sure to prove an indispensable idea book for architects, designers, and homeowners for years to come.