House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930, by Jordan Sand. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, 512 pp., $65.00, £41.95 (hardcover ISBN 0-674-01218-6)

Extract

For over a century, the traditional Japanese house has loomed large in the architectural imagination. Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, praised Japanese houses where he had little but scorn for works of the contemporary West. He admired their spaces and materials, writing, ‘The simple Japanese house with its fences and utensils is the revelation of wood. Nowhere else may wood be so profitably studied for its natural possibilities as a major architectural material’ (Wright 1962: 88). Wright’s contemporaries Ralph Adams Cram, an advocate of Gothic architecture, and Charles and Henry Greene, the remarkable arts and crafts figures, shared his enthusiasm for things Japanese; European modernist architects such as Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut later produced their own interpretations of Japanese houses. Evidence of the persistent appeal of Japanese houses to a broader audience can be found in the publishing history of Edward Morse’s sober and carefully observed Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings; first published in 1886, it remains in print today, an estimable run for a book on a then-obscure subject.