Opening: A Journey to Find Home

Le Corbusier / Mother's House / Switzerland
Ballroom Notebook | For Elderly Parents | A House with a Flowing Story | Architectural Considerations | A Roofless Living Room | A Terrace for Cats | A Mysterious Extension | The Little House

Louis Kahn / Esserik House / USA
Two children with burns | A beautiful temple | Not like a house | A flat surface that does not move |
WIND+EYE | Find the letter ＜T＞

Mario Botta / House of Ligornetto / Switzerland
Round Glasses | Twists and turns | Blending in with the countryside | A masterpiece of access | Beautiful practicality | Boldly closed, delicately open | A house rooted in the earth

Erik Gunnar Asplund / Summer House / Sweden
A child lost in the woods | “When approaching a building, walk.” | Directionality: North and South |
The Origin of the Horizontal | The End of the Twist | Moomin... ... , Resemble | The Forest Where Fairies and Giants Live

Frank Lloyd Wright / Fallingwater / USA
Seat next to the plane | Blue Sky | Land with a waterfall | Horizon and vertical lines | Hearth | Client Appearance

Philip Johnson / Townhouse / USA
Monster | Boy's Dream | Where the Carriage Garage Used to Be | Decoration and Love Song | Crossing the Pond | Placing Yourself in It | Fly Me to the Moon

Alvar Aalto / Koetaro / Finland
White Night | Experimenting with Home | A Family of Mallards on an Outing | A Pleasant Courtyard | Inside a Vertical Box | Waking Up

Gerrit Thomas Rietveld / Schröder House / Netherlands
Thick fog, chimney | Furniture maker Rietveld | One half of identical twin | A small gift box with a ribbon | A house like a large piece of furniture | An avant-garde home where I lived for 61 years

Le Corbusier / The Little Villa / France
House Pilgrimage | Embraced by the Mediterranean | Friendship with Starfish | A Small Villa | Picking Up Rocks

Closing remarks: Building a house
A Guide to House Pilgrimage for Readers

Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Mario Botta, etc.
For the dreams and fantasies conceived in the home of eight masters of 20th-century architecture,
For the lives, livelihoods, and futures of the people living there,
A small and warm house built to preserve memories of a home from time immemorial.

A pilgrimage to find the stories they hold within each house!

A Pilgrimage to Nine Masterpieces by Eight Masters of 20th-Century Architecture
Japanese residential architect Yoshifumi Nakamura visited nine masterpieces of houses built by eight masters of 20th-century architecture, including Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mario Botta, Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, Erik Gunnar Asplund, and Louis Kahn, and wrote about the philosophies and stories they embodied in those houses. His book, "A Pilgrimage to Houses," has been published by Sai Publishing.


A pilgrimage of an architect who, after experiencing the failure of his first work, "Parents' House," sets out in search of a master of housing design.
The author of this book realized that his parents' house was ultimately a failure due to the self-consciousness, competitive spirit, and trial and error of a young, novice architect while building his parents' house as his first project in his twenties.
That experience led me to decide to become a residential architect, and I published this book, a sort of field report and travel diary, written over a period of ten years while visiting masterpieces of housing around the world that served as both a teacher and a textbook for residential design.
The author also went on a field trip to Korea to see an ondol house.


From Le Corbusier, a pioneer of modern architecture, to Mario Botta, the designer of the Gangnam Kyobo Tower.
The architects covered in this book are Le Corbusier of France, a pioneer of modern architecture who said, “A house is a machine for human habitation.” Mario Botta of Switzerland, a world-renowned architect who designed Korea’s “Gangnam Kyobo Tower” and the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art’s “Gallery of Ancient Art.” Erik Gunnar Asplund of Sweden, a master of Northern European architecture. Alvar Aalto, Finland’s national architect and renowned furniture designer. Thomas Gerrit Rietveld of the Netherlands, who transformed from a cabinetmaker to an architect and reflected De Stijl’s ideology in architecture. Philip Johnson, an eccentric American architect who studied architecture late in life after majoring in philosophy at Harvard University and built his first work at the age of 43. Louis Kahn of the United States, who strongly pursued his belief that “there is no architecture without natural light.” Frank Lloyd Wright, who is considered one of the masters of this century’s architecture but was once forgotten as an “architect of the past” due to numerous scandals, but made a spectacular comeback in his mid-60s.


From ＜Mother's House＞ to ＜Small Villa＞, a 4-pyeong studio apartment located on a gravel road
In this book, eight masters project their philosophies and concerns about homes, constantly pondering the questions, “What should a home be?” and “What thoughts and ideas should it reflect?” through the homes they built, sometimes for themselves to live in, sometimes for clients, and sometimes for their parents.
The nine houses they built are as follows:


Le Corbusier's 60-square-foot "Mother's House" on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, built for his elderly parents; the surprisingly small and simply decorated 13-square-foot studio "Little Villa" on a gravel road, which is surprisingly small and simple, unlike the image of a villa of a world-famous architect, where he spent the last days of his life and was more proud of than any of his works and was very happy to live in; Louis Kahn's "Esserik House", which effectively combined glass and wooden walls with the greatest challenge of bringing in sunlight; Philip Johnson's "Town House", which simultaneously contained Western and Eastern sentiments by arranging a courtyard in a straight 7.5-meter-wide space that was once used as a carriage garage; Eric Gunnar Asplund's "Summer House", which never rejected the direction created by nature; Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater", which has a sentimental feel that continues the memory of a dwelling that has been passed down from generation to generation, not only with its splendid exterior rising above a waterfall but also by incorporating the upper part of the rock into the living room; any splendid architecture This book contains the stories of nine houses in which masters of architecture poured their thoughts, philosophy, and imagination into the <human dwelling>, including Mario Botta's "House of Ligornetto," which prioritized the sense of place over technique and applied the style of the local traditional folk house to a modern house to create harmony with the surrounding village; Alvar Aalto's "Coetaro," which contains a longing for and homage to nature, as he did not want the building to stand out in the forest without electricity; and Gerrit Thomas Rietveld's "Schröder House," which was expected to give the impression of an arrogant and cold noblewoman, but was located like a small, lovely, and well-organized box at the end of a remote outskirts and was lived in for 61 years.


A small, ordinary house that still stands strong even after 80 years of construction, without any sense of incongruity.
If you imagine that the houses featured in this book, built by world-famous architects, are so unusual, extravagant, large, and showy that they might even offend the average person, you are mistaken.
The houses they built are small and neat, and they are built in the traditional techniques of the region, and are houses that are in harmony with nature.
The scale of the houses is also not large, but rather average-sized, and they are houses that harmonize peacefully with their surroundings without trying to highlight only their own houses.
Moreover, it is a house that has been in good condition for over 80 years and is still inhabited today.


Architectural Masters Answer the Question: "What Should a Home Reflect?"
A house that reflects the breath, body temperature, and shape of a person's heart, a house imbued with meticulous consideration for daily life, a house that displays a rich imagination about <human dwellings>, a house where small stories unfold, a house that contains a familiar feeling that comes from life, a house that does not feel out of place, a house that does not turn its back on nature, a house that contains both a mysterious fragrance and deep sentiment, a house whose floor plan is neither unreasonable nor vain, a house engraved with memories of home, a house imbued with trust and understanding for the people who live there, a house that is not boastful, a warm house filled with human affection, a house that harbors a heart like the innocent childlike innocence of a young boy captivated by <The Treehouse>...
Masters of architecture have reflected this through their own homes, the homes they have built, and through their homes they have emphasized what fundamental elements a home should have.


Becoming a "Human Observer" and Building a "Human Habitat"
In particular, what the masters considered most important when building a house was “careful consideration for daily life.”
Rather than adding grand, oppressive, flashy, and authoritarian elements, the most important thing was to pay careful attention to the details so that the people living there could enjoy their daily lives warmly and affectionately.
They built the house as a "human observer" who could closely observe human behavior and movements, read and interpret complex psychological plots, and have a flexible mind that could empathize with the joys and sorrows of the people who had to live in that house.
The masters of architecture designed and built houses that prioritized the people who would live in them, so that they could embody the dreams and fantasies, the lives and futures they would cultivate in those houses.


200 on-site photos, 50 sketches, sketches and drawings drawn by the masters themselves,
And a guide map is also attached for readers.
This book includes over 200 photographs taken by the author while visiting the houses himself, along with valuable materials such as sketches and drawings drawn by the master architects while actually building the houses, allowing you to directly experience the spirit of the masters.
Additionally, at the end of the book, there is a house pilgrimage guide for readers who wish to visit the houses in person.