Jutaku: Japanese Houses compresses 500 works of contemporary Japanese residential architecture into a single volume — one house per page, one image per house — producing a survey as relentless and inventive as the culture it documents.
About This Book
Japan's residential architecture exists in a state of permanent reinvention. Far removed from the imperial timber traditions of Kyoto, contemporary Japanese houses are laboratories for spatial thinking: narrow, stacked, folded, translucent, subterranean. Jutaku organises this extraordinary output geographically, moving across the country like a bullet train, presenting 500 houses in rapid succession. The format is deliberately confrontational — each house given exactly one page and one image — forcing comparison and rewarding sustained attention. The effect is cumulative: a portrait of a discipline that treats the domestic brief as an opportunity for genuine architectural risk.
Key Features
- 512 pages of single-image residential architecture documentation, one house per page
- Featuring Shigeru Ban, Sou Fujimoto, Toyo Ito, Kengo Kuma, Jun Igarashi, Shuhei Endo, and numerous emerging and lesser-known architects
- Written by Naomi Pollock
- Published by Phaidon, ISBN: 9780714869629
What You'll Discover
- How Japan's extreme urban density has driven radical experimentation in domestic spatial organisation
- The breadth of contemporary Japanese residential practice, from celebrated figures to entirely unknown young architects working outside the canon
- A geographic cross-section of Japanese architectural output, structured to reveal regional variation and shared obsessions
- The cumulative argument that the Japanese house — constrained by site, budget, and convention — remains one of architecture's most generative briefs
About the Author
Naomi Pollock is an architectural writer and critic with sustained expertise in Japanese contemporary architecture. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 512
- Dimensions: 184 x 124 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780714869629
- Publisher: Phaidon
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and designers with an interest in Japanese residential practice, students studying contemporary Asian urbanism, and collectors of Phaidon's architecture survey titles.