Temple and Teahouse in Japan
by Werner Blaser
Birkhäuser, October 2021 (New edition)
Hardcover (also available in paperback) | 9-1/4 x 12 inches | 172 pages | English (also available in German) | ISBN: 9783035623499 | 78€
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
After a trip to Japan in 1953, Werner Blaser published his landmark book on classical Japanese architecture. His studies of 17th- and 18th-century wooden buildings document minimalist, grid-based structures using stark black-and-white photographs, some color photographs and numerous line drawings. His book, highly prized in terms of design and content, contributed significantly to introducing Japanese aesthetics to Western architecture, art and graphics. Mies van der Rohe, for example, gave it to many of his friends.
The reprint is enriched by a text on the history of the book by Christian Blaser, Werner Blaser's son, a contribution by Inge Andritz on Mies van der Rohe and Japanese architecture, and a personal afterword by Tadao Ando.
Werner Blaser (1924-2019), architect; Inge Andritz, Mies specialist; Tadao Ando, Pritzker laureate; Christian W. Blaser, architect.
REFERRAL LINKS:
REVIEW:
Swiss-born architect, author, and photographer Werner Blaser (1924–2019) made more than one hundred books in his lifetime — 108 according to the German-language Wikipedia. (Oddly, for someone with such a prolific output and many books translated into English, no Wikipedia page for him exists in English.) His first book was Japanese Temples and Tea-Houses, published in 1956, documenting Blaser's six-month stay in Japan in 1953. In between those two years, the Museum of Modern Art in New York built a full-size houses in its courtyard: the Japanese Exhibition House was on display from October 1954 to October 1955 and was accompanied by a book by MoMA curator Arthur Drexler, The Architecture of Japan. Although Frank Lloyd Wright brought the architecture of Japan to the attention of Americans decades earlier (ditto Bruno Taut and Europeans), the 1950s and 60s are when modern architects had their aha moment, seeing justifications for their simple forms and sparse surfaces in the traditional dwellings, teahouses, and temples of Japan.
Blaser spells out the relevance of traditional Japanese architecture to modern architecture on the first page of the book's lengthy introduction, writing that he aimed to "capture the essential Japanese spirit as it is embodied in temples, dwelling-houses and buildings devoted to the tea-ceremony, and to suggest how these structures might shadow forth a new spiritual style of architecture for the West." Keep in mind that before Blaser left for his 1953 trip, he was attending the Institute of Design in Chicago, where he first met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. As such, it's not surprising that Blaser devotes the last few pages of the book's introduction to Mies, whose architecture he describes as embodying "a disciplined structural grammar such as we find in classical Japanese buildings, especially in temples and tea-houses."
In his contribution at the end of Birkhäuser's recently published reprint of Werner Blaser's first book, Christian W. Blaser illuminates how his father sent Mies copies of the 1956 book: Mies was so impressed by it he asked Blaser for dozens more to give to students and friends, and to produce what eventually became Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Structure. The Blaser/Mies connection is also explored by Inge Andritz in the essay that follows, "Mies van der Rohe, Japan and Werner Blaser's Collages." Inserted among the photographs, floor plans, and words of Blaser's documentation of Japanese temples and teahouses are interior perspectives montaged with exterior photos (above). "Superimposed on the rigid, austere drawing of the enclosure," Andritz writes, "is a soft, 'real' outside world, captured photographically as a snapshot." Architects familiar with Mies will no doubt recall the Resor House project (Jackson, WY, 1937–38, unbuilt) with its famous photomontages of the Rockies visible through glass walls depicted with the most minimal of pencil lines. Andritz mentions these earlier collages by Mies, and no doubt Mies's fondness for Blaser's work was aided by the latter's different yet appropriate use of the technique.
Following Blaser's roughly 20-page introduction, the bulk of the book is given over to the documentation in photos, words, and drawings of Japanese temples, dwellings, and teahouses, most from the 1600s to 1800s. It starts with Ginkaku-ji Silver Pavilion in Kyoto, a Zen temple dating to 1483, and ends with two Shinto shrines: the famous Ise Shrine at Uji-Yamada and Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto. The introduction was written and formatted in a way that Blaser's general comments on traditional Japanese architecture are keyed to some of the documentation that follows. For example, the tokonoma — "the picture recess which is tended almost as a sanctuary" — is described in depth, with page numbers referencing photographs depicting the same. The back-and-forth flipping this requires is not my favorite way of reading, but I'm guessing the publisher retained the same format as the original, where the photographs and drawings sit proudly on full pages or spreads rather than interspersed with the text. After the introduction, Blaser's words in the main section of the book are minimal: short descriptive paragraphs of each building prefacing the photos, drawings, and collages.
Of all the places in the Temple and Teahouse in Japan, Blaser gave the most attention and pages to Ise Shrine and the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. The descriptions for Katsura and Ise, like those for the buildings in the rest of the book, dispense with references to the modern age, instead focusing on the history, intentions, and formal aspects of the architecture. Coming in 1956, Blaser's book introduced these buildings and places to wider audiences, but in the next decade large book-length documentations of both Katsura and Ise would follow (see below), capturing Japan's glance at its own history as it rebuilt and modernized after World War II as well as extending the relevance of traditional Japanese architecture to modern architecture. Reading the reprinted book now, many of the lessons conveyed by Blaser are familiar — at least to this architect/writer who has a soft spot for books on Japanese architecture, be it modern/contemporary or traditional. Perhaps I owe some of that interest to Blaser and his first book. He would go on to write many books about Japan, but this first one, with its beautiful documentation of places that still enchant, is definitely deserving of a reprint.
FOR FURTHER READING:
- The Architecture of Japan by Arthur Drexler, published by The Museum of Modern Art, 1955.
- Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture by Kenzo Tange and Noboru Kawazoe with photographs by Yoshio Watanabe, published by the MIT Press, 1965.
- The Japanese House and Garden by Tetsuro Yoshida, published by Praeger, 1956.
- The Katsura Imperial Villa by Sutemi Horiguchi, published by Mainichi Newspapers, 1953.
- Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture by Walter Gropius, Kenzo Tange, and Yasuhiro Ishimoto, published by Yale University Press, 1960.
- Mies Van Der Rohe: the Art of Structure by Werner Blaser, published by Praeger, 1965.
- Structure and Form in Japan: Architectural Reflections by Werner Blaser, published by Wittenborn, 1963.
- West Meets East - Mies van der Rohe by Werner Blaser, published by Birkhäuser, 1996.