Where most of The Japanese House is all about the interiors and life in the crowded city, the exhibition also finds room to breathe in a second monumental installation: Next to the Moriyama House, the Barbican commissioned Terunobu Fujimori to create a unique tea house, made of charred timber and white plaster. Its large round window looks out over a garden, where traditional tea ceremonies are explained to visitors by the Urasenke Tankokai UK Association.
Walking through the installations, one slowly realizes that the lighting in the gallery adjusts, light to dark to light again — a subtle, sped-up dawn-to-dusk simulation. But where the exhibition could fall into caricature, or a Western “Disney-ification” of Japanese culture, it doesn’t — the diversity of each structure and architect featured in the exhibition is examined in such detail that the installations are welcome opportunities for exploration. What could be seen as fantastical is grounded in the complicated history of Japan’s changing urban landscape, where tradition is not forgotten but refigured in countless ways.
Our homes and personalities are intrinsically linked but nowhere more so than in Japanese architecture, where the needs of a building’s residents inform its very construction. The Japanese House welcomes you inside the Moriyama House (2005), designed in Tokyo by Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA) and inhabited by Yasuo Moriyama, an enigmatic urban hermit.
Lose track of time weaving in and out of the house’s ten individual, fully-furnished rooms and maze-like gardens. Rabbit chairs, sliding libraries and an ‘outdoor’ cinema are just some of the details that make up Moriyama’s unusual domestic environment.
As well as the full-size recreation of the Moriyama House, the exhibition also features a fantastical and lovingly crafted Japanese teahouse and garden designed by Terunobu Fujimori, featuring traditional Japanese tea ceremonies throughout the exhibition run. Come and watch day turn to night in the gallery space as part of this full sensory experience.
The Japanese House is the centrepiece of the UK’s first major exhibition exploring Japanese domestic architecture from the end of the Second World War, a period which has consistently produced some of the most influential and ground-breaking examples of modern and contemporary design.
In the wake of the war, the widespread devastation of Tokyo and other Japanese cities brought an urgent need for new housing, and the single family house became the foremost site for architectural experimentation and debate. Since then, Japanese architects have used their designs to propose radical critiques of society and innovative solutions to changing lifestyles.