Kyoto's Landscape: A close look at the Meirin District

Sanjo Street, the old road to Tokyo, is a lively street in the middle of Meirin District in the heart of Kyoto. People live, work, shop and stroll there. The street, like all others in the district, is made up of houses and shops, restaurants, workshops and kinds of activity. The neighbourhood is well known for the many kimono fabrics, but there...

Debates on History and Heritage between East and West

The collaboration between KIT and TU Delft started out with the central theme of machiya, a traditional type of wooden townhouse, known in Kyoto as kyomachiya. Rather than Kyoto’s pre-eminent monuments like shrines, temples or one of the 17 world heritage sites, the vernacular architecture of the kyomachia seemed to be the ideal study subject,...

Adapting Traditional Machiya to a Contemporary Lifestyle

This chapter presents an analysis of adaptations of machiya, traditional Japanese townhouses, in Kyoto. The study aims to develop models for future reuse of machiya that combine contemporary lifestyles and traditional characteristics, in order to present possibilities for the preservation of machiya. The models for reuse are based on an...

Culture is in the Details

During earlier stays in Japan, in 2012 and 2014, I was struck by the great attention to detail, in the scale of the buildings, the streetscape, as well as in the clothing and the presentation of food. Life seems to be an accumulation of independent details that sometimes contrast considerably with one another. A city is made up of buildings, and...

Machi: Neighbourhood and Small Town—The Foundation for Urban Transformation in Japan

In 1854, American navy ships under Commodore Matthew Perry appeared off the shores of Japan and pressured the formerly secluded nation into accepting a treaty that included opening some ports to American ships and the beginning of trading (Reischauer and Craig 1989).<br/>With this opening to outside influences, Japanese professionals began to...