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BOOK Osbert Lancaster’s


Cartoons, Columns and Curlicues October 2015


This beautiful boxed-set contains three long out-of-print and influential books by the great British humourist, Sir Osbert Lancaster (1908-1986) – Pillar to Post, the story of architecture through the ages. First published in 1938 and described


by Gavin Stamp as ‘One of the most influential books on architecture ever published’; Homes Sweet Homes, a history of architectural interiors and a sequel to Pillar to Post, was first published in 1939, and Drayneflete Revealed, first published in 1948, which traces the development of one particularly typical (invented) English town.


BOOK Naomi Pollock’s


Jutaku: Japanese Houses October 2015


Jutaku: Japanese Houses, published by Phaidon in October, reveals the breadth and novelty of contemporary residential architecture in Japan through more than 400 houses. ‘Jutaku’ is the Japanese word for


‘house’. The book illustrates an era of continuous experimentation, as Japanese architects of the 21st century abandon traditional and conventional style, size and shape to create homes the likes of which would not be found elsewhere. An insatiable appetite for the new,


combined with a heavy demand for space in densely populated cities, has resulted in a 30-year average lifespan of a Japanese house. It has become commonplace to buy a plot, sometimes as narrow as 1.8


metres wide, and demolish what is there to make way for a custom-designed home. Architects are contending with exacting building requirements – such as the Sunshine Laws that restrict the amount of daylight a building can obscure – and substantial pressure to come up with a modern home in extreme conditions. The result is an abundance of houses


defined by contorted geometry – steeply sloping roofs, curved or tilted walls, stepped profiles and stacked interiors – and increasingly innovative use of build- ing materials both old and new. There are glass-skinned crystalline creations, blocky apparently windowless houses skeletal, stripped-down buildings; and


houses that would look more at home on the lot of a 1970s sci-fi feature film. Jutaku features over 400 houses – one


image per house, one house per page – in a format that evokes the directness and immediacy of social media platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram. It includes the work of many of Japan’s most-celebrated architects, like Shigeru Ban, Sou Fujimoto, Kengo Kuma, Kazuyo Sejima, Jun Igarashi and Shuhei Endo, alongside many talented, up-and- coming practices.


www.architectsdatafile.co.uk Fiona MacCarthy said: “Masterpieces


of comic erudition… If you don’t already know these books, you have a treat await- ing you. They sum up our architectural inheritance in a hugely entertaining and quite inimitable way.” Sir Osbert Lancaster (1908–1986)


was a painter, a writer, a cartoonist, a theatre designer, an authority on archi- tecture and design, and above all a great British humorist. His pocket cartoons depicting the aristocratic Maudie Littlehampton, her family and friends, which appeared in the Daily Express for forty years, recorded in his inimitably English way the life, news and opinions of the period. His books on architecture


and design were as witty as they were authoritative: in them he depicted buildings and interiors with an unerring instinct for the minutiae of stylistic change and recreated with irrepressible humour the way of life of the original inhabitants.


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