Stillness

Norm Architects is a Copenhagen studio, and co-founder Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen started thinking seriously about Japan in 2017, when he first worked alongside Japanese craftspeople and felt what he described as an uncanny sense of belonging. Stillness, ten years of travel and research later, is the attempt to put that feeling on paper and between hard covers.

The book runs to 304 pages across five chapters, each approaching Japanese aesthetics from a different angle: landscape, architecture, material, craft, and the daily rituals that give Japanese spaces their quality of attention. Photography throughout is by Bjerre-Poulsen himself, whose eye is already trained on the emptied-out, on what a space holds when there is nothing left to add. The images from Japan sit alongside documentation of Norm's own projects, among them the Äng restaurant in Sweden and the Heatherhill Beach House on the Danish coast.

The argument at the centre of the book is that Scandinavian and Japanese design share a root that runs deeper than aesthetics. In Scandinavia, a Protestant austerity shapes the relationship to space; in Japan, the influence of Shinto and Zen Buddhism does the same work differently. Where Danish hygge finds comfort through objects, the Japanese concept of ma finds it in the intervals between them. Bjerre-Poulsen is interested in that gap. Editor Amy Woodroffe and consultants Danielle Demetriou and Malene Wagner give the essays their structure; the result is more considered than a studio monograph.

This is not the most scholarly treatment of Japanese aesthetics available. The comparative angle is personal, and architects wanting hard analysis of structural systems will come away wanting more. What it offers instead is a precise account of how one practice came to understand another culture's spatial thinking well enough to let it change their work. The detail-making in the photographs, many of which are full-bleed against the 245 × 330mm pages, rewards the format.