Model House

What is the difference between a house built for public exhibition and one for everyday living? It depends on one’s framing, said Ken Tadashi Oshima in his Yale lecture on Junzo Yoshimura’s Shofuso Exhibition House, a replica seventeenth century–style shoin-zukuri dwelling built in Japan in 1953, exhibited at MoMA in 1954, and installed in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park ever since. Of course, frames can be rearranged, slotted out. Yoshimura designed his would-be domicile as a showcase of Japanese customs for an American audience. But for a historian like Oshima, the structure also reflected the “constellation of people that were associated with Junzo Yoshimura: his mentor Antonin Raymond, colleague George Nakashima, who we see through his furnishings, and Noemi Raymond, [Antonin’s] partner.”

The post-lecture discussion identified the imprint of Yoshimura’s coterie on Atelier Bow-Wow’s transnational practice. Cofounder Momoyo Kaijima, who teaches at Yale, stressed the continued importance of traditional ways of making in Japanese architecture. If, as she suggested, “c…