Product Description

The Modern Japanese Tea Room showcases chashitsus, traditional Japanese tea ceremony salons, as reconceived by contemporary architects and designers. The formal tea ceremony developed in the fifteenth century, and its ritual is closely defined, as is the space for it: traditionally, chashitsus include windows, an alcove (tokonoma) with flowers and painted parchment, bamboo beds (tatami), and a fireplace on the floor (ro); they do not include furniture, in part because they are spaces for meditation. More recently those traditions -- as closely associated with the upper class as "high tea" in England and its colonies -- have been rediscovered by architects and designers as a perfect match for their contemporary work. The Modern Japanese Tea Room includes projects from renowned Japanese names including Kengo Kuma, Terunobu Fujimori, Shigeru Uchida, Arata Isozaki, Chitoshi Kihara, Yasujirou Aoki and Hisanobu Tsujimura. Their work in a wide variety of materials -- paper, wood, plastic, aluminum, glass, concrete -- represents the latest and most inspiring in Japanese architecture and interior design, from a tree house in Nagano to a portable space in black lacquer. The book opens with an introduction to the history of the tea ceremony, identifying its physical elements and going over to the ceremony itself, and then moves on to more than 35 projects gathered together in 250 of Michael Freeman's powerful color images. A tribute to contemporary Japanese culture and a taste of its future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #347237 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-05
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

World of Interiors, September, 2007
And the Japanese are nothing if not inventive, as demonstrated by this wonderful book.

The Financial Times, May 13, 2007
From Tokyo to Kyoto, talents such as Kengo Kuma, Arata Isozaki and Toshihiko Suzuki are building radical interpretations of the traditional tea ceremony space for restaurants, hotels, temples and private homes.

The Times, December 8, 2007
A gem of a book for anyone interested in modern Japanese architecture and in Japanese cultural history.

Customer Reviews

Tea and Symmetry
This is a magnificent book at every level. That the colour plates should be beautifully produced is only to be expected in a volume of this type, but the work is unparalleled in that it's a practical size: many coffee-table books, mutatis mutandis, could pass muster as coffee tables; not this one: it's easily handleable. Readable, too: the text is unfailingly lucid and informative about modern interpretations of the spaces dedicated to the Japanese tea ceremony.