Author: Takanashi Yoshitaro [ed].
Title: [Bunkamura no Kan'i Jutaku].
Description: Tokyo, Koyosha 1922 (Taisho 11). 19x15cm, publisher's stiff wrapper with mounted illustration; title, 19pp of text and 54 plates printed on one side: photo illustrations, floor plans and renderings, one double page. Some marks and minor signs of use. ¶ Fourth printing, two months after the first, of this architectural guide to Japan's model Culture Village (Bunkamura) of 'simple' housing built for the 1922 Peace Exposition; the purposeful introduction of idealistic westernised homes, rather than mansions and commercial buildings. Western mostly on the outside, not so much inside. Fourteen houses were built by different builders that had to meet 15 guidelines which did not stipulate that the outside had to be western but did demand windows rather than shutters and paper screens and that decoration should be avoided. Living spaces had to be chair style and kitchens and bathrooms thoroughly up to date. After that it was up to the designers and builders and the results are what's usually called ecleticism, hybrid, or borrowing, but isn't so simple in intent. And, as usual, what was borrowed from the west was often a reclamation of what the west had borrowed from Japan: arts & crafts in England, craftsman in America, nouveau, seccesion, werkstatte, and whatever else in Europe.At much the same time as this, across town another Bunkamura - the Mejiro Bunkamura development by Tsutsumi Yasujiro - was being launched, reportedly inspired by the streetscape of Beverly Hills. The houses in both villages were for the new middle classes but Tsutsumi's village was for the upper middle class. Much of what was built during the twenties was destroyed during the war but the remaining fragments show shared characteristics which I'd say, from the bit I've read about him, had nothing to with any idealism in Tsutsumi.

Keywords: architecture design domestic housing reform modernism Japan c20th