In architecture, the private house is both the most personal and the most symbolic of building types. The creative duet between designer and client crystallizes the ideal of the home at a specific moment in time. Art Week Tokyo, with the help of Pritzker Prize-winning architects Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA, is launching a new architectural tour program that will offer visitors a rare look at a variety of post-war private residences in the city. Here we look at the lesser-known history behind them.

The patron saint of Japanese Modernism in architecture is undoubtedly Le Corbusier. Among the influential Japanese disciples, Takamasa Yoshizaka is the least known but the most radical. An avid mountaineer, he designed Villa CouCou (1957) for fellow mountaineer and French literature professor Hitoshi Kondo at Waseda University, following a two-year apprenticeship in Le Corbusier’s Paris workshop. The irregular plan, sweeping roof, sloping concrete walls, deeply tinted windows and sturdy built-in furniture reflect Yoshizaka’s Corbusian tutelage. “Think on the spot” was his mantra, and many details were decided on site. According to Yoshizaka, “to build” was always understood as a verb rather than a noun.

Seiichi Shirai is almost the antithesis of Yoshizaka. A highly intellectual architect, Shirai studied philosophy in Weimar-era Heidelberg and Berlin before the rise of Nazism forced him to return to Japan in 1933. His work eschewed simple innovations and demonstrated a deep sensitivity to enduring universals. Shirai saw more clearly than anyone of his generation the darkness at the heart of modernity. He saw tradition as “anima”, the collective breath of a living culture, and truly modern architecture as an architecture nourished by it. His Workshop No. 7 (1959) reflects its suburban context on the outside, but its interior’s dark wood framing, white stucco inlay, and shoji panels evoke a historic minka farmhouse in rural Japan.

Osaka-born architect Takamitsu Azuma built Tower House (1966) for his young family after moving to Tokyo. One of the most important Japanese urban houses of the 20th century, it is a remarkable nugget of architectural ingenuity squeezed into a small triangular plot of 20 square metres, left over from the construction boom of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Severe space constraints encouraged a muscular six-story form made of raw concrete, where living was arranged vertically, each floor a room. Rejecting public housing and suburbs because they abandoned urban life, Azuma built a residence in close contact with the city, on as large a piece of land as he could afford, next to Gaien Nishi-dori’s new street.

The 1970s were the decade when Japan transformed into an affluent consumer society. Toyo Ito was the architectural poet of this change, whose light, transparent language expressed the postmodern age of information flows and commodified symbols. The House in Hanakoganei (1983) is an early expression of the concerns that would characterize Ito’s work. A steel-framed structure clad in metal and fiber-cement panels offers a tight unity between two distinct volumes: barrel roof and barrel vault. The latter became the leitmotif of Ito’s own residency the following year; its tent-like opening evokes the heady experience of 1980s “bubble era” Tokyo.

Lightness and fluidity are qualities that Ito’s famous student Kazuyo Sejima helped spread into perhaps the most influential expression of Japanese architecture in the 21st century. VIP guests of Art Week Tokyo will have the chance to enter the imagination factory at Sejima’s SANAA office, a seemingly nondescript warehouse built on reclaimed land next to Tokyo Bay.

• Public architectural tours of the Tower House and House at Hanakoganei will be held on November 8-9; Atelier No. Visits to 7, SANAA office and Villa CouCou are part of Art Week Tokyo’s VIP program

• Julian Worrall is professor of architecture and head of the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Tasmania.