Sustaining culture in Japanese architecture: preservation, relocation and adaptive reuse

The UNESCO World Heritage listed buildings at Nara (奈良), including the temple complex of Tôdai‐ji (東大寺), the Edo Tokyo Tatemono‐en (江戸東京たてもの園, Edo‐Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum), and the architectural and economic renewal of Naoshima (直島), an island located in the Seto Inland Sea, offer three approaches to maintaining architectural, and intangible culture in Japan. Here sustainability of physical and intangible culture is necessarily interwoven with matters of governmental policies, economics and tourism, and with matters of the valorization and commodification of the built environment and intangible cultural practices, and their attendant consequences for sustainable practice. Each of these three examples foregrounds issues of architectural ‘authenticity,’ where sustainability is in part addressed through strategies of preservation and continual rebuilding, through relocation, or through adaptive reuse coupled with new architectural projects.