ARCHITECTUREJAPAN
The Phoenix Hall across the Aji-ike Pond

Feature — 2026.06.15

Kyoto: Tradition and Contemporary Architecture

Kyoto: Tradition Meets the Contemporary

Photo: Martin Falbisoner, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — Byōdō-in Phoenix Hall

From a Heian Amida hall to a late 20th-century station building. Reading the layers of architecture in the thousand-year capital.

01A thousand years of timber architecture

The Byōdō-in Phoenix Hall, built in 1053, is a rare survival that conveys Heian architecture, sculpture and garden as a whole. The kakezukuri stage of Kiyomizu-dera's main hall, rebuilt in 1633; the Shariden of Rokuon-ji, rebuilt in 1955. In Kyoto, timber buildings from different eras stand on, each carrying its own story.

02A contemporary gate

At that gateway to Kyoto, Hiroshi Hara's Kyoto Station Building was completed in 1997. Controversial for its relationship to the historic townscape, it was also an attempt to respond to the city not by imitating tradition, but through a new kind of public space: a concourse like a valley.

Facts about the buildings mentioned in this article are based on the sources cited on each building page (Wikipedia, Wikidata, official websites, etc.).This description has been translated from the Japanese original.

In this Story

Buildings in this feature

More stories