| | Japan Towards Totalscape: Contemporary Japanese Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape, edited by Moriko Kira and Mariko Terada.
To prepare for an upcoming trip to
Japan, a friend recommended this book for contemporary architecture
in the island nation. As much a theoretical investigation
into the Japanese landscape and its current context and
a guide to recent buildings, the book is ultimately another
companion to an exhibition, held at the Netherlands
Architecture Institute in late 2000, early 2001. What
makes the exhibition and the book unique is it viewpoint:
Dutch architects looking at the landscape of Japan. While
the former control nature to an enormous degree through
large-scale urban planning, the latter interacts with the
landscape one building at a time, creating a continuous
flow without planning mechanisms like the Dutch. The book
breaks the Japanese landscape into five categories: Metropolitan,
Urban, Rural, Natural, and Artificial, with buildings and
projects placed into each category to indicate how the country
deals with context and how it may in the future. Essays,
interviews and photographs of the generic landscape bookend
each chapter, in a move from the city to the countryside
and back again, reaching what the editors call Totalscape,
the unique projects maintaining both diversity and continuity
in the landscape all across the country.
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