Japan for Architecture Lovers & Building Travelers

About this book

The only English guide that treats Japanese architecture as what the traveller actually walks through — not a catalogue of buildings, but 200 complete building journeys, each one a composed route whose subject is reading architecture: the storehouse street that is a fire's autobiography; the farmhouse that is a silk factory in its attic and a chemical works under its floor; the port whose stone harbour works survive entire; the castle town whose roofs are lead, not tile.

Every journey reads at least three buildings — or one district's whole fabric — in sequence, names its reading method, and names its characteristic misreading: the thatched village taken for a theme street, the pagoda climbed for the view while the mountain beneath it was the building, the red roofs admired as charm when they are frost engineering. Where a dating or attribution is contested, the book says so. Because opening arrangements, restorations and workshop schedules change, the book never asserts them as fixed facts: every entry closes with its own official source to confirm before you travel, while the durable part — what the fabric is, in what order to read it, and where the misreading lies — is given in full.

Eight parts: timber towns and streetscapes · sacred timber — shrine and temple carpentry · roofs of Japan, thatch to copper · craft districts, the towns that build · earth and whitewash — storehouses and fireproof building · water and wood — bridges, ports and waterworks · brick, stone and concrete — the built modern layer · and a building handbook of journeys keyed by material and craft — ending with the 201st journey: your own street, anywhere on earth, read by the method this book teaches.