In his latest book, Neil Jackson brings a new perspective to the study of exchanges of architectural ideas and designs between Japan and the West by examining how people experience and understand the cultural spheres of others. In so doing, he reinvents the ways architectural historians might use extensive and relatively unknown materials from various fields. Although Japanese architectural ideas and technologies have historically been deeply influenced by those of China, a closer look at scholarship on the country's more recent architectural past reveals the study, imitation, and absorption of Western ideas, forms, and technologies, the subsequent rediscovery of traditional Japanese values, and formulations of some distinctive definitions of Japanese space and aesthetics. The tendency to depict Japan and the West in binary opposition has led to fragmentary references to Japan in Western-oriented architectural surveys. Moreover, such studies often place a certain Orientalist-inclined emphasis on a few select projects and...
University of California Press