Katsura: Imperial Villa

A contemporary and expanded version of the seminal and original "Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture". Contains original Kenzo Tange, Bruno Taut, Arata Isozaki, and Walter Gropius essays in English. Many new color photographs and drawings.

Dust jacket has very light rubbing and toning/sunning. Pages have minimal toning to edges. All else is like-new, clean, and crisp. Very good + condition

From the preface:

“It opens with an essay (illustrated with a number of period photographs) by Arata Isozaki, the most original Japanese scholar of Katsura, who has reconstructed the villa's history and sifted the conjectural attributions. Then the images of the complex- the fruit of an extraordinary photographic survey completed by Yoshiharu Matsumura- were skillfully interpreted by Paolo Tassinari's book design, which respects their conceptual constraints and esthetic juxtapositions. The path of the visit to the villa and the graphic documentation that illustrates its architectonic conception were then enriched by the almost two hundred plates of the surveys of the buildings conducted since 1982 and kindly made available by the Imperial Household Agency of Tokyo. The third part of the volume presents interpretations of the imperial villa and, more generally, of Japanese architecture made over the years by the great architects of past and present, from Bruno Taut,
" discoverer" of Katsura and author of a moving album of sketches here reproduced in its entirety, to Walter Gropius, Kenzo Tange and Manfred Speidel.”

From the publisher :
"This book presents a detailed history of Katsura, the 17th century Imperial Palace in Kyoto, Japan that is a pivotal work of Japanese Architecture, often described as the "quintessence of Japanese taste". First revealed to the modern architectural world by Bruno Taut, the great German architect, in the early 20th century, Katsura stunned and then excited the architectural community of the West. Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, pillars of the Modernist establishment, were fascinated by Katsura's "modernity." They saw in its orthogonal and modular spaces, devoid of decoration, clear parallels to contemporary Modernism, going so far as to proclaim Katsura a "historical" example of Modernity. This book documents the palace in detail, combining newly commissioned photographs, detailed drawings, archival material and historical analysis."

10.1 x 11.2 inches