If you're someone who enjoys drooling over real-estate porn on screen or in the newspaper listings, a visit to one of the nicer sections of Ashiya -- an upscale suburb between Kobe and Osaka that's home to spacious modernist houses with sweeping views in leafy surroundings -- is like a nonstop XXX-rated peepshow. The usual mix of admiration and covetousness is transcended, however, at the Yodoko Guest House (a.k.a. the Former Yamamura Residence, as the street sign on the way from Hankyu Ashiyagawa Station has it), a villa designed by Frank Lloyd Wright a few minutes' walk from that station. more...

Occasionally a pioneering movement in architecture can have such a profound effect that its popularity leads to it becoming ubiquitous and we actually lose sight of its reactionary roots. Modernist architecture could be described in this way, in that it revolutionized traditional building methods with steel, glass, and reinforced concrete, and subsequently turned functionalism and minimalism into the basic staples of our contemporary architectural vocabulary. As a consequence, perhaps we tend to forget that many of the structures we encounter in our daily lives actually owe their existence to architects who had a great passion for revolutionizing traditional ways. more...