What do you think?
Rate this book
THE SPACE OF POWER, THEPOWER OF SPACE
Riken Yamamoto is well-known as an architect, but also happens to be trained as a historian. In graduate school, he belonged to a research laboratory dedicated to architectural history. He subsequently embarked on journeys to the Mediterranean region, Central and South America, the Middle East, India, and Nepal, surveying villages and houses as a member of the Hiroshi Hara Research Laboratory of the University of Tokyo. Based on knowledge gained from those experiences as well as from experiences in actual architectural design, Yamamoto analyzes the essential relationship between public space and private space. Hannah Arendt discussed the characteristics of urban spaces in ancient Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, the 18th, the 19th and the 20th century. How did modern society give rise to totalitarianism? Why did humankind reject the template that had worked for so long to create viable communities? Her questions stimulated Yamamoto to seek answers.
216 pages
Published April 15, 2024
1 person want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 20, 2025
"A house is a private space. The city is a bureaucratically governed public space. Private space and public space are kept strictly separate and effectively reject each other. The supervisory agencies administering public space do not involve themselves in private space. They do not intervene inside private space. The freedom of private space is carefully "protected" by governmental power. The freedom of private space, on the other hand, has no influence on governmental power. Freedom is freedom only inside private space, that is, freedom is confined within private space. A space designed to confine freedom is that space called a house. In fact, privacy etymologically signifies a condition of isolation and confinement. We accept such bureaucratically arranged and regulated spaces as a matter of course. Does that mean we are entirely satisfied with living in such isolated houses?"
Is living in urban space that is bureaucratically regulated in this way so comfortable? Why do we accept this state of affairs?
The Space of Power, The Power of Space is a scathing critique of contemporary (mostly modern and postwar) architecture embedded within a broader critique of society (as opposed to a “world”), labor (as opposed to “work”), and our relationship to privacy, which Yamamoto regards as a form of enslavement given the context in which it has arisen. His theories draw heavily on Hannah Arendt, particularly The Human Condition and her writings on totalitarianism and political life. This is a work that questions the authority of the bureaucratic apparatus as it manifests in the built environment.
The book begins by examining how housing has evolved since the Greeks’ conceptualization of the polis, extending into a critique of how capitalism, communism, and various political philosophies have inadvertently enslaved us as wage laborers in a society built for consumption, one in which individuals are reduced to units of labor power through an act of dehumanization. I found the ideas illuminating, particularly in how they challenged my understanding of concepts such as social and workers’ housing (of which he is especially critical), privacy, and the functioning of societies. Yamamoto is equally severe in his critiques of communism and capitalism, linking the development of workers’ housing and our modern conception of privacy to the overall degradation of “society,” which he interprets in purely economic terms, as opposed to a “world,” which consists of durable things imbued with lasting meaning.
Yamamoto is part of a team conducting one of the largest longitudinal surveys on vernacular architecture in villages, an effort that appears to inform his vision of community and of how things might be otherwise. He sees economic growth as a so-called modernizing function that, in reality, moves us backward, isolating us in a one-family-one-house system that breeds loneliness and, ultimately, totalitarianism, as plurality and identity are stripped away. While many of his examples are drawn from postwar Japan, he also engages extensively with Germany and Europe more broadly.
The translation is occasionally rocky and contains minor errors. The book also includes redundancies and at times reads like a thesis. Nonetheless, it is highly readable and illuminating.
Is living in urban space that is bureaucratically regulated in this way so comfortable? Why do we accept this state of affairs?
The Space of Power, The Power of Space is a scathing critique of contemporary (mostly modern and postwar) architecture embedded within a broader critique of society (as opposed to a “world”), labor (as opposed to “work”), and our relationship to privacy, which Yamamoto regards as a form of enslavement given the context in which it has arisen. His theories draw heavily on Hannah Arendt, particularly The Human Condition and her writings on totalitarianism and political life. This is a work that questions the authority of the bureaucratic apparatus as it manifests in the built environment.
The book begins by examining how housing has evolved since the Greeks’ conceptualization of the polis, extending into a critique of how capitalism, communism, and various political philosophies have inadvertently enslaved us as wage laborers in a society built for consumption, one in which individuals are reduced to units of labor power through an act of dehumanization. I found the ideas illuminating, particularly in how they challenged my understanding of concepts such as social and workers’ housing (of which he is especially critical), privacy, and the functioning of societies. Yamamoto is equally severe in his critiques of communism and capitalism, linking the development of workers’ housing and our modern conception of privacy to the overall degradation of “society,” which he interprets in purely economic terms, as opposed to a “world,” which consists of durable things imbued with lasting meaning.
Yamamoto is part of a team conducting one of the largest longitudinal surveys on vernacular architecture in villages, an effort that appears to inform his vision of community and of how things might be otherwise. He sees economic growth as a so-called modernizing function that, in reality, moves us backward, isolating us in a one-family-one-house system that breeds loneliness and, ultimately, totalitarianism, as plurality and identity are stripped away. While many of his examples are drawn from postwar Japan, he also engages extensively with Germany and Europe more broadly.
The translation is occasionally rocky and contains minor errors. The book also includes redundancies and at times reads like a thesis. Nonetheless, it is highly readable and illuminating.
Displaying 1 of 1 review