The perpetual renewal of Japan's built environment is its defining characteristic. Destruction, whether by man-made or natural disaster, seems ingrained in the national consciousness. Japanese cities have endured successive waves of reconstruction - after earthquakes and tsunamis, after catastrophic Arcs, after bombing raids - which have, in turn, shaped urban morphologies. Again and again, the nation has rebuilt itself with speed and determination. At the tail end of the Second World War, on 10 March 1945, Tokyo woke up in ashes and the Japanese government called for urgent housing solutions. Combining prefabricated structural components with traditional elements, such as shoji screens and modular tatami mats, the hybrid solutions proposed by Kunio Maekawa and Kiyoshi Ikebe were minimal and compact. If units were under 50m2, residents were eligible to receive a loan from the housing corporation. In similar circumstances, European architects might have opted to develop large-scale housing, yet tellingly, their Japanese counterparts sought to apply rational building methods to the single family house.
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