Why Japan is Crazy About Housing? A lot of the Japanese
aesthetic, like a lot of Japanese culture, has its roots in religion. Shinto
and Buddhism are the two biggies in Japan, and once you understand that, it
begins to click into place. And impermanence is an enshrined cultural and
religious value (nowhere more so than at Ise's Grand Shinto Shrine , which is
rebuilt every 20 years). These oft-repeated truisms nonetheless fail to offer a
sufficient economic rationale for Japan's ingrained real estate depreciation. Its disposable attitude to housing seems to fly in the face
of Western financial sense. In the country's rush to industrialize and rebuild cities
decimated after WWII, housebuilders rapidly spawned many cheap, low quality
wooden frame houses – shoddily built without insulation or proper seismic
reinforcement. During the mid-1990s, Japan faced an economic recession.
There was an escalation in urban migration, birth-rate was on the decline and
an aging population was on the rise, transforming the standard family
structure. Depreciation is also a holdover from the collapse of Japan's
economic bubble in the late 1980's. This period became commonly known as
Japan’s transition from the ‘bubble’ to ‘post bubble’ period. Faced with the
rapidly changing landscape, a new generation of architects were forced to
re-evaluate their approach to design from an ‘expanding city’ model to a
‘continuous city’ outlook. Their quest led to radical results and creative
possibilities for the new era and beyond. And so, despite a shrinking
population, house building remains steady.
ARTICLE 1 - Why Japan is Crazy About Housing,
http://www.archdaily.com/450212/why-japan-is-crazy-about-housing/
ARTICLE 2 - What Makes Japanese Architecture Different,
http://www.tofugu.com/2013/03/29/japanese-architecture/
ARTICLE 3 - Parallel Nippon: Contemporary Japanese
Architecture 1996-2006,
http://www.archdaily.com/346806/parallel-nippon-contemporary-japanese-architecture-1996-2006/
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