Is Japonisme also a history of architecture? In this book, the authors lay bare the origins of the taste for Japanese architecture in the West. Born long before what French nineteenth-century art critics called Japonisme, this taste can be detected in a wealth of objects: screens, porcelain, lacquer-work, woodcuts, photographs, as well as in interior decoration and garden pavilions.With more than 500 illustrations in colour, this handsome book presents noteworthy historical and archaeological studies of the bestknown buildings from the heyday of Japonisme: the pavilions at the Paris Universal Exhibitions between 1867 and 1900