The volume documents the splendour of the imperial villa of Katsura in its finest details, through previously unpublished photographs and complete metric surveys. The complex, built in the seventeenth century, is articulated through the juxtaposition - inside the large garden - of pavilions for the tea ceremony and the shoins, or individual bays. The purity of the materials used, from the valuable dark hinoki wood to the straw used for the roofs, the rigour of the construction principles, the simplicity of structural elements - columns, architraves and balusters - make it the finest expression of classical Japanese architecture. The work features extraordinary illustrations: each of the pavilions comprising the villa is documented in detail with survey drawings and photographs by Yoshiharu Matsumura that have never been published before. The book closes with a short anthology of texts by Walter Gropius, Kenzo Tange and Bruno Taut, who were the first to note that the villa of Katsura encompassed the classical materialisation of the principles of modernity.

• The diagonal strategy: Katsura as envisioned by "Enshu's taste"
• Katsura and its space of ambiguity
• Architectonic polysemy
• The authorship of Katsura: the diagonal line
• The imperial villa of Katsura
• Interpretations of Katsura
• Appendices