Katsura villa

Katsura Villa takes as its subject the seventeenth-century Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, the shoin-and-sukiya complex whose modular geometry was famously embraced by Bruno Taut and later by Western modernist architects as a prefiguration of the International Style. Hodaka Yoshida's print likely concentrates on the rectilinear rhythm of shōji panels, tatami modules, and engawa verandas, flattening the architecture into a grid of pale color fields punctuated by darker structural lines. Mokuhanga is well suited to this subject: the carved block produces the crisp, even edges the building's geometry demands, while [washi](/glossary/washi) and [baren](/glossary/baren)-pulled inking preserve a softness that prevents the image from reading as purely diagrammatic. The print connects Hodaka's interest in modernist architectural form to a specifically Japanese source, demonstrating how, even in his most abstract phases, he periodically returned to subjects from the indigenous architectural tradition his father Hiroshi had treated more pictorially.