Oro Editions The Hypospace of Japanese Architecture: Text / Images

The Hypospace of Japanese Architecture asks how Japanese architects have responded to the bombing of Hiroshima The book’s cultural study grounds Japanese architecture in its social, political, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, and environmental contexts, and is of interest to architectural professionals, historians, students of East and West, and general readers interested in Japan Twin volumes of text and images map the creative pathways taken by architects in post-atomic Japan The text volume delves into key buildings, events, and ideas; the image volume lays out a parallel visual narrative of nearly 800 photographs selected from historic sources and site visits The slip-cased volumes have bindings that lay flat and draw their inspiration from Japanese graphics and spatial systems Traditional thought fused with modern science when Hiroshima’s nuclear annihilation on August 6, 1945, proved the interdependence of space and time. Since the war, Japanese architects have probed the relativity of spacetime through critical debates, pivotal theories, and consequential buildings. The Hypospace of Japanese Architecture pushes past clichés of an exotic Japan to confront the modernity of an island nation whose habit of importing foreign ideas is less about assimilation than transformation, less a process of indigenisation than one of cultural invention. The realisation that buildings are dynamic events ― phenomena of space-in-time, not inert objects outside time ― continues to inform Japanese architecture and suggests how we can rethink the history, theory, and practice of architecture more generally.