Rowan Moore from The Guardian reviewed Barbican's new exhibition on Japanese architecture entitled ''The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945.'' The exhibition is presented at the Barbican Art Gallery and will be on view until June 25, 2017.

Among the oblong concrete tree trunks that occupy the centre of the Barbican art gallery, opposing structures have grown up, one a series of hard-edged, white-walled boxes, the other a rickety hut-on-stilts, possibly erected by goblins in the night, in charred timber and bumpy plaster. If nothing else they make flesh the sheer imaginative fertility that Japanese architects bring to the design of houses.

''Weeds are wonderful things,” is how the late architect Kiyonori Kikutake once put it, ''for they are expressive of pure vitality,'' which could be taken as the motto for the Barbican’s exhibition.....Continue Reading 

Ohouse, designed by Mitsutaka Kitamura. Image courtesy of The Guardian

The exhibition states that 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.

Top image: House NA by Sou Fujimoto Architects, courtesy of  The Guardian

> via The Guardian/Barbican