Impressions of Japanese Architecture by Ralph Adams Cram

Author:Ralph Adams Cram [Cram, Ralph Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781462900800
Google: ePjPAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B005CVV2C2
Published: 2011-07-05T02:24:35+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Domestic Interiors

WHILE IN PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE, in painting and sculpture, in the industrial arts, and even in the greater part of the domestic architecture of the better class, Japan is fast losing all national quality, the houses of the lower and middle classes still preserve the beautiful characteristics of the old art, so unique, so refined, so wholly ethnic and national.

The nobles are making themselves uncomfortable and absurd in preposterous structures designed by third-rate English and German architects, and the same agency is responsible for shocking public buildings, vast in size, fearful and humiliating in design.

Each year exhibitions are held in Uyeno Park where the pitiful attempts of Orientals to copy European modes of painting are held up to the awestruck admiration of those that short-sightedly desire the death of Japanese civilization, and to the pity and dismay of such Westerners as feel the glory of the abandoned art and the futility and folly of the movement that aims to establish in its place a false theory, an alien ideal.

Yet there are wise and philosophical men in Japan who fight strenuously against the foolish fashion of Westernism, and are made to suffer for it. Then there are architects who steadily refuse to have anything to do with foreign architecture in any of its forms. Such is my old friend, Kashiwagi San, whose house is a faultless model of native architecture, and who now and then builds some delicate and exquisite house for such of the nobility as are still unreconciled to the new era in Japan. Thanks to these men and their colleagues, and thanks also to the strong conservatism of the middle classes, Japanese domestic architecture is still a vital art, strong with a life that may last even through the present inauspicious days, and form a basis for more logical work, when the times have changed and national self-confidence is restored again.

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