The Keihoku Forestry Cooperative in Ukyo ward, Kyoto, needed a materials store and garage, and built it from timber its own members had cut.

Iiyama Cultural Hall in Nagano holds two performance halls and a community center strung along an indoor street the architects call Nakamichi.

Teshima Art Museum, on Teshima island near Takamatsu, looks like a plain concrete bubble. Ryue Nishizawa and structural engineer Mutsuro Sasaki poured its 250mm shell in one continuous 22-hour pour onto mortar-finished earth formwork, so floor and wall meet with no visible edge anywhere.

Courtyard House with Seven Rooms was completed in 2022 in the suburbs of Nishio, in Aichi Prefecture, by Takayuki Kuzushima and Associates.

Akihiro Terada left Tokyo for Aichi prefecture to learn pottery, then in 2010 set up his own studio in Chiba. He fires every piece in a gas kiln built right on site, using dark clay he sources specifically from Mie prefecture.

Pat Inn sits on Chichijima, in the Ogasawara Archipelago, reached only by a 25-hour ferry from Tokyo.

Sekizenkan in Gunma has taken hot spring guests since 1694. Its wooden bath corridors are often cited as the model for Spirited Away's Aburaya.

Izuyasu Ryokan has welcomed guests in Kyoto for 170 years. When Ohno Atelier took on its latest renovation, they chose to keep the original pillars, floor boards, and joinery rather than replace them, scratches, burns, and all.

In Hakone, Kanagawa, architect Yohta Hokigawara’s practice (HAMS and, Studio) gutted a 60-year-old single-story house into a house-and-guesthouse. Demolition uncovered a log beam hidden above the ceiling, spanning the 5-meter living room at the plan's center.

Raumus, the Fukuoka studio led by Masashi Takeda, reworked a thatched minka in Okayama for a family of four. Ad-hoc extensions had left it cramped; Raumus kept the metal-capped thatched roof and exposed dark plywood columns and beams, finishing the ceiling in dark and light lauan plywood.

呼吸の間 (Breathing Room) opened in 2024 at Shiriuchi Onsen in southern Hokkaido. MAP, led by Takahiro Moriya, built its bathing hall beneath curved cedar logs joined into a gassho truss, a form drawn from steep-roofed farmhouses.

Komaeyu has run in Tokyo's Komae suburb since 1954, one of fewer than 2,000 sento left nationwide, down from over 18,000 in the postwar years. Architect Jo Nagasaka, who renovated Koganeyu sento in 2020, kept the reinforced concrete walls bare and added raw plywood for a rougher finish.

Nendo cut a stainless steel sheet with a mirror finish into 2,000 rhombus-shaped pieces for Kaleidoscopic Ivy of Mirrors, draped across the stone garden Isamu Noguchi designed for the Sogetsu School of ikebana.

MM Canele's second shop is a takeout counter for canelés inside Komazawa-daigaku Station in Tokyo's Setagaya ward. Torafu Architects built the counter to look like it's floating - a board mixed with bark from Kiso hinoki cypress, pinned together instead of joined with visible joinery.

Goto Shuhei Architecture Design Office converted an 8-tatami washitsu inside a wood-frame house in Ota-ku, Tokyo into the select shop loose. After the owners' children left, the unused guest room opened to the street: a 50-meter path runs from the road through the garden to the entrance.

A two-story wooden gallery in Otsu, Shiga, Japan, built by CHIKARAISHI ARCHITECTS STUDIO as a brand hub for an electronics company. The 91-square-meter volume is framed entirely in wood: ground floor for product display, upper floor left open for workshops and seasonal events.

Kengo Kuma's Nakagawa-machi Bato Hiroshige Museum of Art is wrapped in louvers cut from local cedar. Their staggered layers echo Hiroshige's woodblock prints, breaking sunlight into overlapping lines. Fire retardant and preservative let the cedar double as roofing. 📷 Mitsumasa Fujitsuka / KKAA

Edo kiriko traces to 1834, when Kyubei Kagaya adapted Dutch glassware into his own cutting style. Toru Horiguchi now holds the craft as the third generation to carry the name Shuseki, passed from his grandfather Ichio to master craftsman Tomio Suda before reaching Toru.

The Kondo Museum in Kyoto sits along the Chawan-zaka approach to Kiyomizu-dera Temple, in the Higashiyama district.

Sagawa Art Museum in Moriyama, Shiga is showing Kichizaemon X, a collaboration series now in its 13th edition pairing an industrial designer with a ceramics dynasty. This round pairs nendo with Raku Kichizaemon XV, fifteenth in a line of tea-bowl makers.

Morimata Ryokan's lobby is split by two inserted boxes at different heights: one raised 150mm above the floor for sofa seating, the other 300mm higher for a tatami floor-seating area.

Yomogino Ryokan's hot spring bath in Fukushima was rebuilt after the 2011 earthquake off Japan's Pacific coast damaged the original structure. Architect Ryuichi Sasaki of Sasaki Architecture designed the replacement, completed that same year.

Jo Nagasaka of Schemata Architects renovated a wooden two-story ryokan on Tsushima, off Nagasaki, into hotel jin. Built in 1868, the first year of Meiji, it stood on Omachi-dori near the ferry terminal in Izuhara.

Hotel Siro, completed in 2020 in Tokyo's Ikebukuro district, drops the sealed hotel box entirely. Mount Fuji Architects gave each floor its own open stairway, echoing the exposed stair alleys of Nagasaki and Onomichi.

Maruhiro, a hasamiyaki ceramics maker founded in Saga prefecture in 1957, turned an 86-year-old townhouse into its new office. Architect Daisuke Motogi led the renovation, called Ouchi.

A pottery workshop and shop for 300-year-old Obori Soma ware, built in 2021 in Nishigo, Fukushima, after the kiln's home village of Namie stayed under evacuation orders following the 2011 disaster.

In Kumamoto, architect Hiroshi Nishimura of Work Visions designed Shinsui Public Bathhouse after a client asked for a sento in the summer of 2018.

Nendo built Tenri Station Plaza CoFuFun, a 6,000-square-meter public plaza in Tenri, Nara prefecture, near Kyoto. The site is made from a cluster of precast concrete mounds, each shaped after kofun, the ancient burial tombs scattered across the Japanese countryside.

Japan's pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka-Kansai is a circular ring of cross-laminated timber, designed by Oki Sato of Nendo with Nikken Sekkei. The CLT is made by slicing small-diameter logs into thin laminae and pressing them into layered boards, a method that widens what low-value timber can become.

nendo's first large-scale retrospective opened at Design Museum Holon in Israel in June 2016, running five months across the museum's ground and upper floors.