Japan in Architecture: Genealogies of Its Transformation, an exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, is like taking the entire country and its architectural history and putting it in a nutshell—well, not exactly a nutshell, since it comprises 100 separate displays, from a 3rd-century terra-cotta model found in a burial site to the present, with an emphasis on the last 150 years since the Meiji Restoration. Much has been made over time about how Japanese architects responded to Western Modernist styles, but here the curators show how the essence of Japan’s traditional, even classical, architecture, along with vernacular forms and natural settings, maintains a presence in the most contemporary of forms, which in turn have been exported elsewhere. With an abundance of stunning models, vivid photography, informative videos, and old and new sketchbooks, this composite view is as enjoyable as it is informative—a kind of travel or, better yet, an after-having-traveled experience.

Divided into nine sections, the exhibition, which runs through September 17, appropriately begins with “Possibilities of Wood,” since the concept of kigumi, the craft of interlocking joints, is endemic to Japanese architecture. (Other sections include “Transcendent Aesthetics,” “Roofs of Tranquility,” and “Crafts as Architecture.”) Carpentry books on view with diagrams of wooden shrine roof motifs imported from China and Korea were harbored in secret until they leaked out. In the exhibition the double roof of the Great Southern Gate of Tōdai-ji in Nara (1199), with bracket arms, penetrating tie beams, and fan rafters, is juxtaposed with the long span of stacked and cantilevered wooden parts of Kengo Kuma’s 2010 Yusuhara Wooden Bridge Museum, similar in appearance.