Japanese Architecture

Shintō shrines preserve some of the oldest building forms. The Grand Shrine of Ise is rebuilt every twenty years in an identical form on an adjacent site (shikinen sengū), a practice that has kept the shinmei-zukuri style of plain cypress, thatch and crossed roof finials alive for well over a millennium. Buddhist temples arrived with curved tile roofs, bracket sets and bright colour; the halls and pagoda of Hōryū-ji are the world's oldest surviving wooden buildings, and the Great Buddha Hall of Tōdai-ji in Nara was long the largest wooden building in the world.

Later periods produced the Phoenix Hall of Byōdō-in (1053), the austere Zen temples of the Kamakura period and the richly carved, lacquered Tōshōgū in Nikkō, the shrine of the first Tokugawa shōgun.

Aristocratic mansions of the Heian period followed the shinden-zukuri style, with halls linked by corridors around a garden pond. In the Muromachi period the shoin-zukuri style introduced features still found in Japanese rooms: tatami covering the whole floor, the tokonoma alcove, staggered shelves and a built-in writing desk. The tea room brought a rustic simplicity that shaped sukiya-zukuri, the style of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, whose clarity impressed modern architects such as Bruno Taut in the 1930s.

Farmhouses (minka) vary by region: steep thatched gasshō-zukuri roofs in the snowy mountains of Shirakawa-gō and Gokayama, L-shaped magariya in Iwate. In towns, merchants lived in machiya, narrow and deep townhouses with a shop at the front, often called 'eel's beds' in Kyoto, while kura storehouses with thick plastered walls protected goods from fire.

Japan's castles developed rapidly in the late sixteenth century, when warlords built stone-walled citadels crowned by multi-storey keeps (tenshu). Many were demolished after 1873 or destroyed in the Second World War; twelve keeps survive from before the Meiji era, five of which are designated National Treasures. Many others have been reconstructed, often in concrete.

The Meiji government invited foreign architects such as the Englishman Josiah Conder, who trained the first generation of Japanese architects. His student Tatsuno Kingo designed the red-brick Tokyo Station (1914). Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel of 1923 survived the Great Kantō Earthquake the same year; its lobby is preserved at the Meiji Mura museum near Inuyama. Le Corbusier's National Museum of Western Art opened in Tokyo in 1959.

Tange Kenzō shaped the postwar era with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (1955) and the suspended roofs of the Yoyogi National Gymnasium for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Around 1960 a group of younger architects launched Metabolism, which imagined cities as organisms of replaceable units; Kurokawa Kishō's Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972) became its icon and was dismantled in 2022.

Since the 1970s Japanese architects have been at the forefront of world architecture. Andō Tadao, a self-taught former boxer, became known for smooth concrete, water and light, as in the Church of the Light near Osaka and the museums on Naoshima. SANAA (Sejima Kazuyo and Nishizawa Ryūe) creates light, transparent buildings such as the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. Kuma Kengo works with timber and fine layered elements, including the Japan National Stadium used for the Tokyo 2020 Games.

The Pritzker Prize, often called the Nobel of architecture, has honoured more Japanese architects than architects of any other nationality.