'towards a nude architecture' is a visual journey tracing japan's bathhouse culture

Yuval Zohar traces centuries of bathing rituals in japan

Architect and visual storyteller Yuval Zohar brings more than ten years of travel across Japan to life in his latest book, Towards a Nude Architecture, published by the Dutch imprint nai010. Using a curated mix of photographs, hand-drawn diagrams, collages, and maps, Zohar takes readers on a journey through Japan’s unique bathing culture.

At the heart of the publication are two key traditions: the onsen and the sento. Onsen are natural hot springs, heated by Japan’s abundant geothermal activity, often found in mountainous or rural areas. Sento, on the other hand, are public bathhouses that use heated tap water and became popular in urban neighborhoods, especially during times when most homes didn’t have private baths. While onsen are often seen as destinations for retreat, sento have served as part of daily life as a place to unwind, socialize, and connect with the local community.

As communal bathing becomes less common in modern urban life, many of these traditional places are disappearing or being transformed, with Zohar’s book reflecting on this change. 

Onsen Materiality | Wood | images courtesy of Yuval Zohar and nai010

Towards a Nude Architecture reflects on collective care design

Japan’s approximately 30,000 natural hot springs spill across one of the most geothermally active regions on Earth, touching everything from Shinto purification rites to feudal health cures and contemporary wellness tourism. Towards a Nude Architecture, however, resists the pull of nostalgia and instead offers a layered exploration of how onsen architecture has evolved in response to shifting cultural, environmental, and technological forces. Organized into three chapters – past, present, and future – Yuval Zohar’s book traces the transformation of bathing culture, beginning with the tranquil wooden bathhouses of the Edo period, moving through the pragmatic and often austere municipal sento of the 20th century, and culminating in the emergence of contemporary privatized spas that mirror broader societal trends toward urban individualism, commercialized leisure, and reimagined notions of public intimacy.

Tsurunoyu’s cloudy water (nigoriyu) rotenburo

a visual archive of water and loss

Zohar, based in the onsen town of Yugawara, takes readers on an immersive, almost topographical journey, where water and steam become guiding metaphors for transformation and collective intimacy. His visual documentation, both personal and precise, includes baths nestled in mountains, forgotten rural sento slowly reclaimed by vegetation, diagrams showing how volcanic activity shapes site planning, and collages where human bodies dissolve into clouds of vapor.

Even though architecture here serves as a membrane between the social and the elemental, the story Zohar tells is also one of disappearance. As local bathhouses shutter due to aging owners, dwindling visitors, and the rise of mega-facilities or in-home baths, the future of Japanese communal spaces faces an uncertain future. The book becomes a quiet call to action, aiming to protect these fading sanctuaries of the everyday, where the unclothed body exists without hierarchy and where architecture hosts a fragile form of coexistence.

With Towards a Nude Architecture, Yuval Zohar charts the thermal pulse of a culture, and in doing so, reveals how architecture can rescue our most elemental ways of being together.

The Author Yuval Zohar in Kita Onsen’s Tengunoyu

Tsurunoyu Onsen in deep winter

ranging from Japanese woodblocks, to western etchings, manga, anime, and video games

architectural axons of onsen are featured in the book

Oimatsu onsen, also known as Dungeon Onsen, a dilapidated building housing an eerie soak

Kodakaranoyu, Takaragawa Onsen’s largest rotenburo

Takaragawa Onsen Site Plan

the emerald green waters of Iojima’s Higashi Onsen

origins of onsen

Yuval Zohar charts the thermal pulse of a culture

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The House of Light’s bath is an inhabitable work of art by James Turrell

Onsen Materiality | Stone

Makanoyu, the most famous of Takaragawa Onsen’s rotenburo

Katsuranoyu, Ginkonyu’s whimsical onsen treehouse

Oimatsu onsen, also known as Dungeon Onsen, a dilapidated building housing an eerie soak

The House of Light’s bath

Tsurunoyu in Beppu

Ubayu Onsen in Yamagata

NYC, the City of Steams, is home to the largest underground steam network in the world

Onsen Therapy, Toji

Origins of Onsen

project info:

name: Towards a Nude Architecture

author: Yuval Zohar

publisher: nai010 publishers | @nai010_publishers

pages: 208