Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology 6(13): 2464-2469, 2013

ISSN: 2040-7459; e-ISSN: 2040-7467

Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2013
Submitted: December 23, 2012
Accepted: February 08, 2013
Published: August 05, 2013

Research on the Contemporary Japanese Architectural Creation and its Special

Aesthetical Taste of Nationality
1, 2

Shan Linlin and 1Liu Songfu

1
School of Architecture, Harbin Institute of Technology, China
2
School of Art, Heilongjiang Universities, China
Abstract: Contemporary Japanese architecture has achieved great success and has been widely accepted by the
whole architectural field. What is the driving force for the contemporary Japanese architectural creation is worth of
thinking carefully about. In this study, some famous Japanese architects, including Toyo Ito, Tadao Ando, Arata
Isozaki, Kengo Kuma, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa and their architectural studiess are analyzed and studied
from the angle of nationality. These architects keep up with the step of the world architecture and always pursuit the
aesthetical taste of nationality. They proposed some special architectural theories that profoundly reflect the
nationality of Japanese and make great influence on the architectural forms, architectural space and architectural
aesthetics of Contemporary Japanese architecture. In the architectural form, they pursuit the simplicity, pureness,
lightness and finesses; in the architectural space and behavior, they pursuit the shadow of the ma space and nature
existence; in the architectural aesthetics, they pursuit the beauty of animism, dreariness and substance sadness.
Through conjoint analysis of the architectural examples and the theory of nationality, this study proposed that the
contemporary Japanese architectural creation is directly derived from the profound traditional culture and firm
nationality and nationality is the cornerstone of the Japanese architecture and always promotes the progress of the
Japanese architecture.
Keywords: Architectural creation, contemporary japanese architecture, nationality
INTRODUCTION
Contemporary Japanese architecture that has a
strong characteristic of the aesthetical taste of
nationality has achieved great success and has been
widely accepted by the whole architectural field. From
the Meiji Restoration to the end of the twentieth
century, Japanese architects keep up with the step of the
world architecture and always pursuit the aesthetical
taste of nationality for generations. At the beginning of
this century, few architects are interest in the decoration
of architecture or the historical building style in the
Japanese architectural field. The pure imitation style is
also hardly touched, but the aesthetical taste of
nationality is widespread.
Architectural nationality is derived from the
traditional cultural nationality and it also has the basic
value trends to maintain and develop the national
culture. In the face of the impact of foreign culture,
nationality can efficiently resolve the conflict through
purposeful choice and then renew the traditional culture
by changing the national culture to new forms.
Therefore, nationality has the characteristics of tradition
and typicality. From the human cultural history,
nationalism often appear when national culture faces
survival crisis against strong foreign heterogeneous

cultures and it is the instinct of a stress response, rather

than rational thinking. So, it shows a nonconscious
thought tendency. In the architecture, it is unworkable
that an architectural form is regarded as the eternal.
With the development of the age, people have new
views on the way of life and aesthetic taste and then
create new national forms that are derived from the
traditional thinking. Therefore the nationality has the
characteristics of continuity and development.
Contemporary Japanese architectural nationality is
a new concept that is put forward from the angle of
Japanese nationality and its constraint to Japanese
architecture. It is closely related to natural factors,
structure factors, social factors and psychological
factors in Japanese architecture and enables Japanese
architecture to always return to the instinctive and
nonconscious behavior of its original national culture
when facing the shock of strong foreign cultures. It
does not exclude the rational part of foreign cultures; on
the contrary, it brings many into its own use, while the
special thing is that it always returns to its original
culture after integrating the rational part of foreign
cultures and forms new matters with characteristics of
original Japanese culture. Owing to the identification,
attachment, belongingness of its nation and culture, the
nationality of Japan has a strong grassroots basis.

Corresponding Author: Shan Linlin, School of Architecture, Harbin Institute of Technology, China, Tel.: 13674612627

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Researching on Japanese architecture and national
culture, it can be seen that the success of contemporary
Japanese architecture is closely associated with the
nationality of Japanese. The nationality of Japanese
architecture can be found in many aspects, such as its
architectural forms, architectural space, architectural
aesthetics and so on.
NATIONALITY IN CONTEMPORARY
JAPANESE ARCHITECTURE FORM

Fig. 1: Five-ringed tower of sukhavati temple

Everything has its two sides, so does nationality. It

owns both active and positive functions. During
humans construction activities, nationality owns direct
guiding significance on the original and extrinsic forms
of architecture.
Simplicity
and
pureness
of
architectural
configuration: In the history of Japanese architectural
development, for a long time the buildings have been
designed in the forms of rectangle, square, rotundity,
etc. Basic geometric figures, which is related to
Japanese peoples emotion to the nature and inheritance
of Buddhism, for they think pure geometric shapes can
unscramble the constituting principle of the universe.
Take the Five-ringed Tower in Sukhavati Temple as an
example, it is named Five-ringed Tower because the
Five-rings represent the Five Elements of the
universe, to manifest which, the shapes of cube, sphere,
pyramid, crescent, ellipse were piled up from the
bottom to the top to form a tower and was named
Five-ringed Tower, as shown in Fig. 1. This idea is in
the deep creation emotion of every Japanese architect
(Arata, 2010).
Tadao Andos architectural forms always use this
kind of pure basic geometric figures, always using arc,
such an elementary geometry, when rotundity is
required and showing no interest in the free styles
created with modern steels, as he said: I only choose
simple rotundity and square as my architectural shapes
(Ando, 1987). When mentioning spirit over form, he
said: make correspondence with the infinity of spirit to
the inanition of form, by integrating rich, complicated
and changeable space to simple geometries. He thinks
its more likely to keep the pureness of architecture, cut
all imaginations and make it own pure stereoscopic
impression in pureness and contemporary construction
materials can better highlight the significance of
architecture when used with pure basic geometries
because of their simplicity. Ando wrote: my main
purpose is to create architecture with both abstractness
and concretization by giving pure geometries with
mazy representations (Wang and Zhang, 1999). Thus,
we can see these two elements in all his studiess, such
as Museum of Literature, Galleria Akka, Garden of
Fine Art and Azuma House and so on. The famous
architect has created diverse architectural forms inside

Fig. 2: Zhouzu and Zaozuo

the simple geometries. Such a pure geometry

condensation on architecture not only meets Japanese
architectural thinking, but also tallies with the tradition
of the modern west, for this reason, the buildings meet
the aesthetic standards of the modern west and
meanwhile own Japanese characteristics.
Lightness and fineness of architectural structure:
Compared to other countries buildings in the same age,
ancient Japanese architecture is more fine and
consistent in structure. The ancient Japanese believed
that buildings had souls and just as the ancient Chinese
did, they put many ancient literature ideas in buildings
and most of them were exquisite amatory poems. For
instance, in The Tale of Genji the palace of the moon,
the place for enjoying the moon was from the story of
Yuegui (laurel) of ancient China. Under the guidance of
such a fine exquisite emotion, Japanese architectural
shapes tended to be fine and pretty. The architectural
structure of ancient Japan was wood structure which
was commonly adopted in the east, such a structure in
Japan was divided into zhouzu and zaozuo, the
former one refers to pole, girder, mudsill, joist and so
on structural units and the latter one means parvis,
window, shed, bedroom, grid, etc. composing elements,
as shown in Fig. 2. Those wood units are more fine and
consistent than Chinese wood elements of the same
period and are greatly different with western masonry
buildings for being fine, light, pure and consistent and
natural and delicate rather than being splendid and
imposing (Itou, 2008).
In comparison with other nations architects,
Japanese architects are more careful in handling the
surface of buildings and are better at replacing threedimension entities with complication surfaces and
making them become people major impression of
architecture. DIOR Omotesando and 21st Century
Museum of Contemporary Art designed by architects

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Fig. 3: DIOR omotesando

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa both have shown

this idea. In 21st Century Museum of Contemporary
Art, the two architects chose 360-degree transparent
and open glass curtain walls, making the shape
extremely slight. While DIOR Omotesando used the
form of veiling to express this idea. It is a seven-floor
cuboid building, with glass as its outside walls attached
with transparent propylene panels, which were
processed to as its outside wall materials in folding
shape so as to utilize the irradiation of lights and enable
the visitors to see a building as if it is enwrapped by
gauzes. The glass curtain walls on its surface were
layered with wire lines, but they give peoples a feeling
of homogeneity and smoothness under the influence of
sunshine, environment and so on factors and makes the
building look light and floating, transparent and flowing
as a crystal cube, as shown in Fig. 3. Kazuyo Sejima
and Ryue Nishizawa have annotated the fine structure
of Japanese architecture.

Fig. 4: Exhibition of Ma-Time and Space of Japan.

Fig. 5: Shanghai Zendai Himalayan art center

imagination. A building can have many possibilities

resulting from different persons different feelings on
space out of their personal experience, knowledge and
memory. Everyone knows ma as a feeling and
experience, but no one can express and explain it in
language or theories, which just is Arata Isozakis ma
space theory.
In 1978, Japanese Culture Special Feature
Exhibition was held in Paris Decorative Art Gallery, in
which Arata Isozakis ma space theory was realized.
It is an absolute time of homogeneous moment that can
NATIONALITY IN CONTEMPORARY
flow straightly from the starting point to the ending
ARCHITECTURE SPACE
point and extends to a focal places in X, Y and Z
directions, it is calculated completely according to the
Japanese space cognition owns stronger sensibility
calculation standards of modern science. In the
than the western peoples, including temporality,
exhibition, he combined traditional Japanese
umbrageousness, fuzziness, etc. features, which are also
recognition on space with contemporary architectural
found in contemporary architectural space.
aims and created the show of Ma-Time and Space of
Japan, as shown in Fig. 4.
Shadow of architectural space: Tanizaki, one of
Shanghai Zendai Himalayan Art Center, the new
major writers of modern Japanese literature, wrote in
study of Arata Isozaki completed in 2006 is the central
his essay In Praise of Shadows: Our ancestors
manifestation of his architectural thought. It is a
reluctantly lived in shadowy houses, but they have
complex composed by many cubes, including art
found beauty from the shadows gradually, Actually,
center, artists creative studio, guestrooms, public space
the beautiful degree of a Japanese house is totally
and commercial facility. As a whole, it adopts the
determined by its shadow degree. Such a traditional
layout of traditional nine-courtyard of China to realize
cognition of shadow and chaos of space of the Japanese
space penetration. Its core is the art center in the
people is obviously shown in its contemporary
centrality and the multifunctional theatre that can hold
architectural field. For example, Arata Isozakis ma
over 2000 persons and a garden in the air is designed to
space and Fumihiko Makis oku space theories have
make the over ground and underground squares form a
both mentioned this viewpoint.
cubic public space. As for the center of the building, the
As a student of and being affected by Kenzo
architect uses the method of optimization of
Tange, Arata Isozaki has strong interest in traditional
evolutionism structure, of which the condition formed
Japanese architectural space and has committed himself
by the enveloping space is the ma space theory, as
in the exploration. He uses Japanese traditional mean of
shown in Fig. 5. The design can be fast accepted by
black and shadowy space to achieve the distance sense
Chinese, because it complies with the space cognition
between humans and buildings and make observers
of people from East Asian countries. The cubic as the
incompletely know about them so as to fully exert their
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Fig. 6: Transitional space of Nijocastle

Fig. 7: The silvery cottage

guestrooms is on the platform of over thirty meter

height, the artistic pictographs on the bottom out wall
are embedded into the grids, such a design expresses
the tradition in an abstract way and makes the space
with sense of shadow. The art center is divided into two
extremely different parts: the glittering and translucent
cubic and natural and organic anomalous part.
Furthermore, their space conditions are different too,
one is a public commercial space and the other is a
closed office space, the place blending the two parts is
Arata Isozakis ma space theory, because the
comparison space with vividly different features is its
expression.

the idea nature exist in space and behavior expressed?

The ancient Japanese believed that architectural space
was given by the natural environment, there was no
clear limit between space and environment and they
need exchange and communication. In Nijo Castle in
Kyoto, the walls of traditional buildings do not belong
to bearing structure and are open, there is a transitional
space between the inside and outside, as shown in
Fig. 6. It plays an important role in adjusting nature,
including soaking up the sunshine, adjusting monsoons
and avoiding rains (Kenji, 2011). When all shoji
screens are open, sunshine, wind and outside landscape
enter the room, humans and the natural environment are
full of emotions, while the building itself disappear, as
shown in Fig. 7. The identification of such a transitional
space is made according to humans behavior-when
humans and the nature are interactive, it is the extend of
the inside floor; when the screens are closed, it is
outside gallery. Furthermore, the inside space of
traditional Japanese buildings has no separation gallery,
folding screens and shoji screens are used to separate
the space into moving spaces, the space forms can be
changed in accordance with human behavior. In
conclusion, traditional Japanese buildings are based on
human space.
In 1986, architect Toyo Itos own house The
Silvery Cottage was built in Tokyo, which is the
modern explanation of Japans traditional spatial
concept. The buildings spatial structure is partial twofloor. On the first floor, the center is an atrium, its right
is washroom and study, its south is bedroom, its north is
dining room and living room, whose right is tearoom,
the north most part is a store room. The baby room is
on the second floor. The whole building centers around
the atrium, which is the fuzzy space of the building and
nature and through which people can get to any room of
the building. It seems simple, but is actually rich.
Walking in it, you can feel the openness of the space.
The Silvery Cottage differs from normal houses,
because it is the exhibition of the traditional open,
temporary and floating space of Japan. The architect
deliberately weakened the attribute of space and makes
it flow inside and outside; he also uses transparent or
hollowed double acting doors as its separations to
create the false and the true of the inside and
outside of the building. From its design, we can see
Toyo Itos architectural creations show the national
spatial concept of Japanese, especially in humans grasp
of spatial behavior and flowing, he pursues the realm of
traditional Japanese space.

Nature of architectural environment: Japanese

nationality regards environment as nature, which is
compared with the construction civilization of the
modern west. It was advanced by Japanese politician
Masao Maruyama in his study A Study on Japans
Political Thought and later applied in national
architectural styles by Japanese architect Ryuichi
Hamaguchi, who thinks that nature is what, is formed
naturally according to the environment or the subjective
cognition of people on trends of things. This is Japanese
peoples intrinsic value on life and stresses humans
emotional action power on the environment and
peoples subjective behavior possibility given by it.
Traditionally, Japanese like to image an architectural
space as an artistic conception (such as a tearoom); in
such an artistic conception people will have a kind of
behavior (realization of life), which comes from the
artistic conception, certainly vice versa. The higher the
NATIONALITY IN CONTEMPORARY
level is, the broader and profounder humans spatial
JAPANESE ARCHITECTURE AESTHETICS
behavior is.
About the soul of traditional Japanese architectural
Japanese national ideal owns the special
space, Ryuichi Hamaguchi pointed out in his essay that
philosophical views of easterners and the discourse of
the concept of Japanese architecture tends to space and
Buddhism is its supreme realm. Japan also develops
behavior. In traditional Japanese architecture, how is
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Fig. 8: Dull landscape in Ryoanji

Fig. 9: Kiro-san observatory

Fig. 10: Japan pavilion designed by Tadao Ando

Zen thought, which believes that impermanence is the

highest ideal level of existence in the universe and it
corresponds to the real worlds physical forms. The
basis of existence is nothing, while nothing is not
the end of spiritual revivification. In the thinking of
exceeding nothing, spirit gains the highest
intoxication, which is over nothing and guide spirit to
absolute existence. Absolute existence means the things
exist outside the relevant world (Shuji, 2011). Japans
Zen thought shows common people all things and the
truth and is reflected in all aspects of Japanese society,
especially in Japanese peoples unique aesthetics on
arts, including architectural aesthetics. The ideal of
Japan is their pursuit of nature.

Another representative example of dull landscape

is Ryoanji in Kyoto, which was built in the 15th century.
It is an oblong courtyard of 330 m2 with 15 pieces
stones in different shapes and sizes and there are also a
limitless sea made of white sands and a thick forest
made of mosses in a symbolic way, as shown in Fig. 8.
In it, you can image a big natural world.
Under the influence of the thought of
impermanence, contemporary Japanese architectural
works always give people a feeling of illusion and
meditation (Ido, 1991). Furthermore, they have put
forward some architectural theories in Japanese
thinking, such as Kengo Kumas decomposition. He
once mentioned that the creative thought was from
Japans courtyard culture. One of the good
manifestations of his decomposition thought is KiroSan Observatory designed by him in 1994, in which he
adopted a new method of reversing to express the
quietness of the architecture, which is located on a
hilltop of an island of the enclosed sea, is constituted by
platforms set off by green boskages and connected by a
narrow slit. The visitors cannot see the architecture
under the mountain. He thinks that an observatory
should be built for visitors to view landscape, while in
reality most of them are located highly and become
architecture to be seen, thus are often simply standing
in the natural environment. In his design, to dissolve
the observatory, he broke the architecture and buried it
into the ground on the hilltop, thus set an out-of-order
building in a turbid environment, which disappears
through diffusion with the disordered context around.
This is particle architecture advocated by him later, that
is to say a building needs to be broken down and the
broken particle will gain higher freedom through
recombination, as shown in Fig. 9.

Natural beauty of architectural aesthetic ideal:

Natural beauty is the foundation and main body of
Japanese awareness of beauty. Japan owns rich natural
resources, they has been enjoying the beauty of the
nature from the beginning, with deep love and special
emotion to it. Their cognition of beauty has originated
from the nature, thus natural beauty becomes the ante
type of all kinds of beauty in Japanese culture. They do
Dreariness and substance sadness of architectural
not observe but feel the nature with emotions and
aesthetics: The thought of impermanence is shown in
imagination and raise them to virtue and sentiments. In
every field of Japanese society, especially in its
architecture field, their cognition of natural beauty was
traditional buildings and courtyards, which express Zen
from Japans proterozoic.
in the form of impermanence, of which the best
In 1992 World Exposition held in Sevilla, the
example is Japans dull landscape. No pool, no
Japan Pavilion designed by Japanese architect Tadao
running water, only some stones standing, this is dull
Ando showed us the traditional Japanese thought of
landscape, this definition is from Gardening. Such a
natural beauty as a typical study by combining
kind of courtyard is different from others, it has no
traditional wood architectural space with modern timber
water and tree and only stones, sands and mosses are
framing craft, as shown in Fig. 10. The building adopts
used to create dynamic effects and a visionary world of
wood structure with 4-floor on the ground, a lot of
concrete things. It uses emptiness to represent
wood walls, stakes and beams are used and a system of
nothing, enter immensity from finity, abandon self to
glued wood beams is used as its bearing. The visitors
reach the realm of anatta.
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enters the building through a bridge-shaped arch with
special traditional charm that leads to the 11m-height
viewing platform, the entrance of the pavilion is a large
open multilayer space, a huge porch. In this building,
the designer strongly expresses his desire of harmony
between humans and natural environment. The whole
wood building has no painting coat, all materials are
used to show their original appearances, the Teflon
cover can directly introduce the sunshine to save
energy, furthermore, the soft lights and the wood
architecture set each other off, which reminds people
traditional Japanese resident space. The front and back
of the architecture are cambered walls made of wood
battens, giving prominence to the natural materials and
meanwhile showing the shape beauty of modern
architecture. The whole building not only strongly
expresses traditional Japanese thought of natural
beauty, but also stresses the ecological concept of
modern architecture; with it the designer has showed
the whole world the charm of traditional Japanese
aesthetics in the form of transformation.
Contemporary Japanese architectural aesthetics is
the ecological aesthetics combining traditional natural
aesthetics with western aesthetics (Wu, 1997). As
Tadao Ando says: nature is not the original nature, but
the ordered nature generalized from nature or the
disordered nature arranged by humans-artificial
nature! The nature referred by Ando is not the
greening nature in a general sense, but the artificial
nature or architectural nature. He considers that
greening is just a mean to beautify the reality and it is a
rude way to simply take gardening and the season
change of the plants in the gardens as the symbol. The
nature with abstract light, water and wind is shown
when materials and architecture based on geometry are
imported together. Onishi Yoshinori also points out that
the experience of beauty contains two basic parts:
natural part and artistic part. The essential structure
of art exists in the relation integrating the two parts.
These are the voices of contemporary Japanese
architectural aesthetics field; from them it can be found
natural ecology is the root of contemporary Japanese
architectural aesthetics.
CONCLUSION
The success of contemporary Japanese architecture
is the result of the hard study of the Japanese architects
for generations and also is directly derived from

national spirit of Japanese. In the evolution process of

the traditional architecture, the architectural form with
the aesthetical taste of Japanese is never ruled out when
it is impacted by the advanced culture. At the last
century, the modernist swept across the whole world,
the aesthetical taste is used to interpret the eastern
architectural culture in Japan and its driving force is
derived from the nationality of Japanese. The
aesthetical taste of nationality is universal in
contemporary Japanese architecture and it is also the
representative characteristics of nationality. Through
conjoint analysis of the architectural examples and the
theory of nationality, this study proposed that the
creative thinking of Japanese architecture owns the
profound traditional culture and firm nationality and it
is a various nonlinear system, making a transition to
ideological constraint from simple imitation. Although
contemporary architecture has characteristics of
polytropism, nationality of Japanese always affects its
development and the aesthetical taste of nationality is
the spiritual foundation of the development of Japanese
architecture.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This study was supported by the Philosophy and
Social Sciences Research of Heilongjiang Province
(11E066).
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Kenji, G., 2011. The Perspective of Japanese
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