Review: The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945

When reviewing, in these pages, the 2015 exhibition The World of Charles and Ray Eames at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, I observed how the building's heavy, windowless gallery had been imbued with some of the sunlight of Southern California.¹ In the recent exhibition The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945, curated by Florence Ostende and designed by Lucy Styles, the re-creation by Ryue Nishizawa (the N in SANAA) of his Moriyama House in Tokyo (2005) made the defamiliarization of the gallery almost complete.

Architecture and life started afresh in Japan after 1945 and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In architecture, this was...