Japan: Architectural Guide

Contemporary Japanese architecture has, for over seven decades, achieved worldwide recognition not only for its highly innovative and often futuristic qualities, but also for its sensitive response to Japan’s cultural heritage and physical context, which has become especially challenging given the country’s increasingly urbanized environment. Today, Japan’s contemporary architecture is admired perhaps as much as its traditional counterpart, with which it often maintains a meaningful dialogue.

Botond Bognar’s Architectural Guide – Japan introduces more than 700 of the most prominent examples of this fertile architecture, in addition to outlining its development from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in a concise historical essay. All texts are accompanied by over 980 colour photos, all taken by the author, and over 90 drawings. Detailed information about each entry is enhanced by geodata in the form of QR codes.

Featured in the book are the works of such renowned architects as Tadao Ando, Jun Aoki, Atelier Bow Wow, Shigeru Ban, Norman Foster, Sou Fujimoto, Hiroshi Hara, Itsuko Hasegawa, Herzog & de Meuron, Junya Ishigami, Arata Isozaki, Toyo Ito, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kengo Kuma, Kisho Kurokawa, Le Corbusier, Kunio Maekawa, Fumihiko Maki, Togo Murano, MVRDV, Hiroshi Nakamura, Nikken Sekkei Ltd., Ryue Nishizawa, Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, Antonin Raymond, Junzo Sakakura, SANAA, Kazuyo Sejima, Kazuo Shinohara, Seiichi Shirai, Shin Takamatsu, Kenzo Tange, Yoshio Taniguchi, Rafael Vinoly, Frank Lloyd Wright, Riken Yamamoto, Koichi Yasuda, and many others

Botond Bognar is a professor and Edgar A. Tafel Endowed Chair in Architecture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is an internationally recognized scholar of contemporary Japanese architecture and urbanism. He has lectured all over the world and has a long list of publications to his credit. Among his most recent books are Beyond the Bubble: The New Japanese Architecture (London: 2008), Material Immaterial: The New Work of Kengo Kuma (New York: 2009), and Kengo Kuma – Portland Japanese Garden (New York: 2019; co-­authored with Balázs Bognár).