How to Make a Japanese House distils three decades of Japanese single-family residential practice into 21 lessons, making the case that the spatial ingenuity developed under Japan's extreme urban density is now essential knowledge for architects worldwide.
About This Book
Japan's residential architects have long operated under conditions that would defeat most Western practitioners: minute sites, dense urban fabric, and clients who expect genuine spatial generosity within footprints that elsewhere wouldn't merit a second glance. This book treats those constraints not as curiosities but as a design methodology worth studying in earnest. Through interviews, drawings, and photographs drawn from contemporary Japanese housing, editor Cathelijne Nuijsink maps the thinking behind 21 homes, revealing how compact domestic architecture achieves effects of openness and light that larger buildings routinely fail to produce. As global urbanisation continues to compress residential sites, the strategies here are directly applicable to contemporary architectural practice far beyond Japan.
Key Features
- 21 case studies drawn from three decades of Japanese residential architectural practice
- Edited by Cathelijne Nuijsink
- Research, interviews, architectural drawings, and photographs throughout
- Published by NAi010, ISBN 9789056628505
What You'll Discover
- How Japanese architects engineer spatial generosity — light, volume, and perceived openness — within some of the smallest single-family homes built anywhere in the world
- The design logic that emerges when extreme urban density is treated as a creative brief rather than a limitation to be mitigated
- How domestic space can be structured to feel expansive at minimal square footage, with direct implications for housing design in any dense city
- A counter-argument to the Western equation of quality with quantity, articulated through built work and the architects' own accounts of their thinking
About the Author
Cathelijne Nuijsink is the editor of this volume. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: [Details available upon request]
- Pages: [Details available upon request]
- Dimensions: 160 x 238 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789056628505
- Publisher: NAi010
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and urban designers working with constrained residential sites, students of housing and domestic space, and practitioners interested in how density-driven design cultures produce transferable spatial strategies.