After the Crash

In the late 1980s, Japan was awash in seemingly unlimited wealth and rising toward what would be the peak of its modern economic success, power, and influence. In 1991 the same lethal combination of risky loans, inflated stocks, and real estate speculation that created this "bubble economy" caused it to burst, plunging the country into its worst recession since World War II. New Zealand-born architect Thomas Daniell arrived in Japan at the dawn of this turbulent decade. After the Crash is an anthology of essays that draw on firsthand observations of the built environment and architectural culture that emerged from the economically sober post-bubble period of the 1990s. Daniell uses projects and installations by architects such as Atelier Bow Wow, Toyo Ito, and the metabolists to illustrate the new relationships forged, most of necessity, between architecture and society in Japan.