Houses and People of Japan. Bruno Taut. 1938. Scarce

John Gifford Publisher. London. First UK edition. 

Original tan cloth binding

318pp. About 550 illustrations. 

Front and back endpapers are of handmade Japanese paper.

Frontispiece colour woodcut by Tokuyuki Katsuhira of Akita. 

8 coloured wood prints are tipped in throughout the book.

The book gives an account of Bruno Taut's three year residence in Japan describing Japanese architecture and its relation to Japanese civilization. 

All together there are 553 illustrations including b/w photographs, most of them by Bruno Taut, sketches by Taut and contributions by Japanese and other artists as well as architectural drawings and plans. Includes appendix with graphics of currents and winds in the summer and winter, tables describing the weather in 1934 and miscellaneous statistics, e.g. effects of natural calamities in 1933, loss of lives in 1933, individual living costs, etc. and a general index at rear.

Being a noted advocate of socialist political policies, Taut was compelled to look for opportunities to emigrate from Germany when the Nazis gained power. He was promised work in the USSR in 1932 and 1933, but was obliged to return to Germany in February 1933 to a hostile political environment. 

Later in the same year, with an invitation from Japanese architect Isaburo Ueno, he travelled to Japan in May, 1933. Taut made his home in Takasaki, Gunma, where he produced three influential book-length appreciations of Japanese culture and architecture, comparing the historical simplicity of Japanese architecture with modernist discipline. He was noted for his appreciation of the stark, minimalist vein of Japanese architecture found at the Ise Shrine and the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. He was the first to write extensively about the architectural features of the Katsura Imperial Villa from a modernist perspective. Contrasting it with the elaborately decorated shrines of shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu at Nikko, Tochigi, he famously said that 'Japan's architectural arts could not rise higher than Katsura, nor sink lower than Nikko’. 

Taut's writing on the Japanese minimalist aesthetic found an appreciative audience in Japan and subsequently influenced the work of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. The difference between Taut and his Modernist contemporaries was never more obvious than at the 1927 Weissenhofsiedlung housing exhibition in Stuttgart. In contrast to the pure-white entries from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, Taut's house (Number 19) was painted in primary colours. Le Corbusier is reported to have exclaimed, 'My God, Taut is colour-blind!'.