With its elegant oblong shape and captivating cover image, this historical survey would look great on any coffee table. But after you savor its photos and pore over its archival building plans, you should give architect Andrea Leers’s cogent text a good read. This fascinating story of Japan’s early resort hotels is an important addition to the study of the country’s architecture and is the only book available in English, or in any other language, investigating these unprecedented works.
Contrasting starkly with Japan’s traditional small-scale inns, these palatial edifices were built during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the country was eager to attract foreign visitors. As Leers relates, the first wave of Western buildings had arisen shortly after Japan opened its doors to the world at the start of the Meiji period (1868–1912), ending some 200 years of near isolation. In its quest to quickly modernize, Japan mimicked European and American antecedents when it began constructing public and commercial buildings. As the Japanese absorbed technology from abroad, copying gave way to blended architectural vocabularies. In the case of these hotels, this resulted in an intriguing new expression.
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