Here are 100 books that From Shinto to Ando fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a student fifty years ago I struggled with architecture. I have spent my whole career as an architect and teacher trying to understand how it works. All my books are intended to convey that understanding to others as clearly as I can. I believe that architecture is a universal language of place-making, simply and directly expressed in the traditional architectures of different cultures around the world, and lifted into the realms of poetry by some gifted individuals. For many years I taught at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff, Wales. I am currently Professor Emeritus at The University of Dundee in Scotland.
All of my recommendations are about the ways modern architects have learnt from traditional architecture. The first appeared when I began working on the first edition ofAnalysing Architecture back in the 1990s. It is Kevin Nute’s exploration of the ideas that Frank Lloyd Wright gleaned from encounters with traditional Japanese architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nute’s book influenced my perception of architectural creativity as not fitting neatly into separate historical/stylistic categories, but as a realm of possible cross-fertilisation across cultures.
This book is the first thorough account of Frank Lloyd Wright's relationship with Japan and its arts. It presents significant new information on the nature and extent of Wright's formal and philosophical debt to Japanese art and architecture.
Eight primary channels of influence are examined in detail, from Japanese prints to specific individuals and publications, and the evidence of their impact on Wright is illustrated through a mixture of textual and drawn analyses.
As a student fifty years ago I struggled with architecture. I have spent my whole career as an architect and teacher trying to understand how it works. All my books are intended to convey that understanding to others as clearly as I can. I believe that architecture is a universal language of place-making, simply and directly expressed in the traditional architectures of different cultures around the world, and lifted into the realms of poetry by some gifted individuals. For many years I taught at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff, Wales. I am currently Professor Emeritus at The University of Dundee in Scotland.
Konstantinidis was a leading modern architect in Greece. Filled with his own sketches and photographs, he put this book together to illustrate his debt to the traditional architecture of his own country. It implies a line of shared relationship with landscape and materials going back thousands of years, to Callicrates and Ictinus (architects of the Parthenon) and beyond. I like that this book includes pictorial sketches and plans of traditional buildings, as well as constructional details showing the uses of materials readily available from the land.
As a student fifty years ago I struggled with architecture. I have spent my whole career as an architect and teacher trying to understand how it works. All my books are intended to convey that understanding to others as clearly as I can. I believe that architecture is a universal language of place-making, simply and directly expressed in the traditional architectures of different cultures around the world, and lifted into the realms of poetry by some gifted individuals. For many years I taught at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff, Wales. I am currently Professor Emeritus at The University of Dundee in Scotland.
Two of the biggest names in twentieth-century architecture. Thoroughly researched, Neumeyer’s book explores the thought processes of the first, the generally taciturn German architect Mies van der Rohe. It includes a discussion of his fascination with traditional African architecture and its clear relationship between form and the constructional potential of specific materials (timber, grass, stone, rope, mud…) which of course translates into Mies’s own work with modern materials (welded steel and plate glass). But there is a lot more to this book than that; too much to cover here.
As a student fifty years ago I struggled with architecture. I have spent my whole career as an architect and teacher trying to understand how it works. All my books are intended to convey that understanding to others as clearly as I can. I believe that architecture is a universal language of place-making, simply and directly expressed in the traditional architectures of different cultures around the world, and lifted into the realms of poetry by some gifted individuals. For many years I taught at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff, Wales. I am currently Professor Emeritus at The University of Dundee in Scotland.
Illustrated with many of the sketches made by Le Corbusier during his legendary 1911 ‘Journey to the East,’ when he travelled from northern Europe down to the Middle East, Kortan’s book examines the lessons possibly the greatest architect and urban designer of the twentieth century learnt from the traditional Ottoman architecture of Istanbul and Anatolia, including its poetic relationship between inhabitation and spatial organisation. This book is in Turkish, English, and French.
All these books have reinforced my understanding of architecture as a universal language of place-making shared by all cultures around the globe, and as the richest and endlessly fascinating expression of our relationship with the world in which we find ourselves…
I am an architect from Greece who
traveled to Japan in the 1990s as an exchange student. Visiting Japan in the
early 1990s was a transformative experience. It led me to a career at
the intersection of Japanese studies and spatial inquiry and expanded my
architectural professional background. I did my PhD on the
Tokaido road and published it as a book in 2004. Since then I have written several other books on subjects
that vary from the Olympic Games to social movements. In the last 16 years, I've taught at Parsons School of Design in New York where I am a professor of
architecture and urbanism. My current project is researching the role of space
and design in prefigurative political movements.
Tokyo, Form and Spirit was the catalogue for an exhibition at the Walker Center in 1986 with contributions of the most important Japanese urban writers of the 1990s: Henry Smith, Kenneth Frampton, Donald Richie, Marc Treib, Chris Fawcett to name but a few. While I never saw the exhibition, the perspective of the authors created a mental scaffolding that shaped my understanding of the transition from the feudal to modern Japan. Henry
Smith is reading the city of Edo through a bipartite scheme characterized by the sky and the water, or how the city was viewed differently from above, as incarnated by the gaze of the samurai and other authorities, and from below, typically by the commoners who enjoyed life across the city’s waterways. He then searches for this structure in today’s Tokyo where the city’s skyline is dominated by wirescape and high-rise edifices, and the water has almost evaded.…
Essays discuss the evolution of Tokyo's art and architecture from the seventeenth century to the present and the coexistence of technology and tradition
Nearly 50 years ago I was completely taken with the patterns drawn, woven, or embroidered by the Indigenous Peoples of the Upper Amazon of Peru. This was my first experience with the power of pattern and led to a career in collecting and curating the pottery and textiles from that area. By the end of the 1980s, I was ready to start a family and a more settled job. The Design Library was the perfect segue. The patterns created in Europe, Africa, and Asia over the past 250 years are also important cultural statements and are continually re-interpreted by our clients for today's market.
A serious departure from my list from a guy who is dedicated to surface design and pattern, but it is a beautifully designed book with wonderful photographs of architectural sculptural structures. Not much color but there are patterns of course, in the surface textures, created by repetition in the design details, and by the light finding its way through these often grand forms.
This book is a celebration of concrete: collating fascinating and beautiful images of concrete structures from the breathtaking New York Guggenheim to coldly functional aircraft hangars, Concrete will engage anyone interested in architecture and encourage them to think about the sculptural qualities of buildings. Familiar icons by Le Corbusier and Tadao Ando are featured alongside vernacular structures such as petrol stations, vast power plants and London Zoo's famous penguin pool.
Japan is endlessly fascinating. Many foreigners who have spent a year or two engaging with Japanese culture have published memoirs. But there are also many who have lived here longer, perhaps marrying and raising families and retiring in Japan. The stories of long-term foreign residents dig deep into the culture and share unique challenges and triumphs. My own memoir, Squeaky Wheels is about my experience raising a biracial daughter who is deaf and has cerebral palsy in off-the-beaten-track Japan. It also details our mother-daughter travels around Japan, to the United States, and ultimately to Paris. It is ultimately a story of my attempt to open the world to my daughter.
When Wakabayashi first arrived in Japan, as a journalist and curious traveler, she was not particularly religious. She met and married a Japanese acupuncturist with an affluent background, and began a family of her own. Later, she began to seek meaning in Judaism, even managing to engage with a small Jewish community in Tokyo. The heart wants what the heart wants, but Wakabayashi shows how difficult it can be to reconcile the conflicting desires of the mind and soul in an interfaith and intercultural family. Her deeply engaging story provides insight into rarely-scene subcultures in Japan, while detailing her spiritual development, and her eventual decision to leave. Wakabayashi is a skilled, veteran storyteller, with a story absolutely worth reading. This book is for anyone with an interest in Judaism, Japan, motherhood, marriage, and/or intercultural relationships.
Contrasting wedding ceremonies—a lavish Imperial Hotel Shinto affair for his side, a modest Jewish wedding for hers—set the stage for a fascinating union between two spiritual seekers, who raise their children in Tokyo with Jewish and Japanese roots.
Wagamama means "selfish" in Japanese, but not in the sense of hoarding cookies. Having an opinion that goes against tradition can be viewed in Japan as selfish. With the author coming from a line of feisty, opinionated, secular Ashkenazi Jewish women, friction was inevitable—despite the fact that she married into a remarkably peace loving family, who respected her need to connect to…
From the age of 11, and an encounter with an illustrated anthology entitled The World of Zen, I have been drawn to and fascinated by the spiritual, philosophical, and folkloric aspects of East Asian Culture. I studied the subject at Cambridge University and subsequently trained in Zen Shiatsu therapy. Most of my books draw from my passion for East Asian culture, and Japan in particular. I have travelled widely in Japan over the last two decades, and for Tsunami Girl spent four years researching, interviewing survivors, and visiting Fukushima. I am now working on a new book on Japanese yōkai and ghosts…
Away from the 2011 disaster itself, Fumio Obata’s Just So Happens is a wonderful graphic novel again exploring that borderland between konoyo (this world) and anoyo (that world). And it just happens to be another story that bridges Japan and the West, this time Japan and the UK. Central character Yumiko travels back to Japan for a family funeral, and is immersed in a world of ritual, Shinto temples, Noh theatre – at once both familiar and strange to her. Word and image combine beautifully to draw on themes that have obsessed me for years.
Yumiko was born in Japan but has made a life in London, losing herself in its cosmopolitan bustle. She has a gallery show of her art, a good job, and a good guy she plans to marry. The culture she grew up in seems very far away-until her brother phones with the news that their father has died. Yumiko returns to Tokyo and finds herself immersed in the rituals of death while also plunged into the rituals of life-fish bars, bullet trains, pagodas-as she confronts the question of where her future really lies. Just So Happens deals both gently and…
I have lived on a small island in Japan for over 25 years. I moved into my aging and empty Japanese abode before akiya—empty houses—became a phenomenon, and I described my experiences in a regular column for The Japan Times from 1997 to 2020. I love Japan’s countryside and wish more tourists would visit places outside Japan’s major cities. The living is simple, the Japanese people are charming and Japan itself is one of the most unique places in the world. These books are written by people who have taken the leap and chosen the tranquil existence of the pastoral Japanese countryside.
This is a diverse collection of stories told by ex-pats living in “inaka," the Japanese word for the countryside. An array of ex-pat authors describe their experiences: Some came to Japan as English teachers, journalists, or spouses, one cycled through Japan, another walked in the footsteps of haiku poet Basho, and another became a Buddhist priest.
The collection starts in Okinawa and moves up the archipelago to Hokkaido. For me, it’s the most diverse collection of voices on the topic of countryside living.
Inaka: Portraits of Life in Rural Japan is an affectionate but unsentimental immersion into the Japanese countryside ("inaka"). In eighteen chapters we undertake an epic journey the length of Japan, from subtropical Okinawa, through the Japanese heartland, all the way to the wilds of Hokkaido. We visit gorgeous islands, walk an ancient Buddhist pilgrimage route, share a snow-lover's delight in the depths of record snowfall, solve the mystery of an abandoned Shinto shrine, and travel in the footsteps of a seventeenth-century haiku master. But above everything, Inaka answers the question of what it's like to be a foreigner living in…
Azby Brown is a widely published author and authority on Japanese architecture, design, and environment, whose groundbreaking writings on traditional Japanese carpentry, compact housing, and traditional sustainable practices are recognized as having brought these fields to the awareness of Western designers and the general public. His creative work spans many media and has been widely exhibited internationally. In 2003 he founded the KIT Future Design Institute in Tokyo, focussing on cognitive and cultural issues surrounding the human hand and its use in the creative process, conducting collaborative research with neuroscientists and perceptual psychologists. A native of New Orleans, he has lived in Japan since 1985 and is currently on the sculpture faculty of Musashino Art University in Tokyo.
Len Brackett trained with superb carpenters in Japan and returned to the US West Coast to create exquisite Japanese-stye houses and other buildings. His work is in extremely high demand. This book shows how high-quality Japanese-style design and construction can be adapted to our current lifestyles without sacrificing either aesthetically or functionally. Brackett’s descriptions of his design and construction process, as well as of the wood material he uses, are enticing and provide a lot of technical and philosophical insight.
Built like a piece of fine furniture, the traditional Japanese house is universally admired for its clean lines, intricate joinery, and unparalleled woodworking. Focusing primarily on a new guesthouse in California, this elegant volume shows how a classic Japanese house can be built to offer the warmth and comfort that modern homemakers require.Len Brackett, rigorously trained as a temple carpenter in Kyoto, has spent decades adapting the ancient Japanese design aesthetic to Western needs. Here he demonstrates step-by-step how both the traditional live-on-the-floor house, as well as models that accommodate furniture, can be constructed to provide such modern essentials as…
