Learning from ‘Hōjōki’: Tiny Architecture Reweaves Life

Learning from ‘Hōjōki’: Tiny Architecture Reweaves Life at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT begins with a 13th-century text about living in a ten-foot-square hut. Written by Kamo no Chomei, Hōjōki reflects on impermanence through the small dwelling he called home, and the exhibition uses that modest structure as a way to think again about contemporary habitation and the built environment.

Exhibition director Yoshiharu Tsukamoto brings together architects, designers, artists, and companies to reinterpret Chomei’s hut within the same nine-square-meter footprint. Their structures fill the galleries alongside research into the forms of living described in Hōjōki, turning the historic text into a series of physical propositions about how little space a life might need, and what that constraint can make visible.