Modernist Design
Introduction
European and American modernists arrived in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century and reported finding the thing they had been arguing for. Modular planning, post-and-beam structure, movable partitions, uninterrupted floor planes, built-in storage and the absence of applied ornament were already standard in Japanese domestic architecture and had been for centuries.
This makes the influence question worth stating carefully. Japan did not give modernism its programme. It gave modernism a completed, inhabited, several-hundred-year-old demonstration that the programme was liveable, at a moment when the movement had mostly built prototypes.
The record
- Japanese objects entered European design circulation through the international expositions of the mid nineteenth century, producing the taste known as japonisme.
- Frank Lloyd Wright saw the Ho-o-den, a half-scale Byōdō-in pavilion, at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His subsequent planning shows continuous space, low horizontal massing and screened rather than walled division.
- Bruno Taut arrived in Japan in 1933 and wrote about the Katsura Imperial Villa as a work of the same order as the modernism he had left behind, published in English as Houses and People of Japan (1937).
- Charlotte Perriand went to Japan in 1940 as a design adviser to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and her 1941 exhibition Tradition, Selection, Creation reworked her own furniture in bamboo and other local materials.
- Walter Gropius visited in 1953 and 1954 and produced Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture (1960) with Tange Kenzō and photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro.
Tatami Size
The most transferable element was dimensional discipline. Japanese rooms are sized in tatami, and the mat is a unit rather than a furnishing. The Kyōma standard mat measures about 1.91 by 0.955 metres and the Edoma about 1.76 by 0.88 metres, with regional variants between. Room size is stated in mats, structural bay spacing follows from the mat, and sliding panels, ceiling heights and storage are coordinated to the same grid.
The result is a building system in which components are interchangeable between rooms and between houses. Modernism spent the 1920s trying to reach this condition through standardisation. Japan had reached it through a unit of floor covering.
Just as a room measured in mats coordinates everything else in the house, a well-chosen module resolves proportion before the design begins.
