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When Japan's booming postwar economy hit the wall in the late 1980s, the shock struck deep into the country's architectural and urban design communities.

They had long been accustomed to generous public patronage; it suddenly dried up. Architects had luxuriated for many years in a buoyant atmosphere that encouraged vivid formal experimentalism. Then, in radically straitened circumstances, the design extravagance that had rolled out with Japan's once-expanding market looked excessive, outré . Japanese designers found themselves not only without commissions, but also without a clear artistic direction.

But in the two difficult decades since 1990, Japan's creative people have struggled back to their feet and forthrightly tackled the realities of their country's post-crash condition. The steep decline in regional jobs and inner-city real estate prices, for instance, have drawn millions from the countryside and provincial cities into the high-density centres of the Tokyo, Nagoya and Kansai regions – prompting fresh thought about the design and building of both the large cities and the deserted small ones.

Design Exchange

Modern Tokyo house by Hiro Yamashita and Atelier Tekuto.

As if financial woes weren't bad enough, Japan's birth rate has been falling and its people are aging, leading designers to apply themselves energetically, for example, to crafting innovative facilities for the elderly and infirm. Architects have also rediscovered sources of inspiration, strict in tone and environmentally sensitive, in Western modernism and home-grown traditions of construction. Despite many uncertainties in society and culture at large, Japanese architecture and urban design have enjoyed a renaissance during a period when we might least have expected one.

Such is the persuasive argument of Parallel Nippon: Contemporary Japanese Architecture 1996-2006, the appealing exhibition now on view at Toronto's Design Exchange. Organized by the Japan Foundation and the Architectural Institute of Japan, this illuminating show features 112 projects completed in the troubled decade under review. A few are by foreign architects working in Japan (Renzo Piano's splendid Maison Hermès in Tokyo, for example), and some are museums in the United States by Japanese architects (Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban, Yoshio Taniguchi). Most schemes on display, however, are by Japanese architects designing for cities and towns in their native land.

Design Exchange

Layer House, by architect Hiroaki Otani, was built using stacked precast concrete beams.

These architects are represented by buildings of several types and scales. At the large end, there is Hiroshi Hara's vast train station in Kyoto, significantly – in light of Japanese architecture's rekindled interest in reusing older structures – a dramatic renovation and extension of an existing terminal. There are kindergartens and elementary schools that can be transformed into housing for the elderly, as changing times dictate. There are art galleries, Buddhist temples and Christian churches, attractive hospitals, a glistening Louis Vuitton boutique in Nagoya, a wonderfully serene crematorium by Fumihiko Maki, and Toyo Ito's radiantly glassy Sendai Médiathèque – what used to be a library in the pre-Google age.

But this show asks to be considered as something more than a collection of beautiful objects. As chief curator Riichi Miyake notes in his introduction, Parallel Nippon is intended to depict architecture as a “composite activity that straddles culture, technology and economics, and, regardless of the size of the project, represents a concentration of human creativity.” The context of that creativity is the complex modern city. Each project here has been chosen with a view to demonstrating contemporary Japanese architecture's engagement with the urban and cultural dynamic of the era, and with new (and sometimes old but neglected) artistic and engineering strategies.

This engagement is nowhere more effectively illustrated than in the show's gathering of residential commissions. Houses have always been test sites for modern ideas and materials, and so they are for Japanese architects at the present time.

For an example of what I'm talking about, take the stylistically modern Tokyo house by Hiro Yamashita and Atelier Tekuto. Filling its tight lot in a jumble of low-rise structures, this very handsome three-storey residence is made almost entirely of load-bearing glass bricks. Light floods the interior and internal supports are eliminated, a moment of modernist clarity has been inserted into the aesthetic chaos of Tokyo – all the result of advances in glass technology and the architectural will to make living in the very dense fabric of Tokyo an experience of both beauty and serious efficiency.

This show has come to Toronto at exactly the right time. Many in Hogtown's creative class are thinking about how best to build densely and sustainably in the downtown core, and how to respond with verve and ingenuity to the changing conditions of metropolitan life. Parallel Nippon is full of hints about urban living with both style and conscience.

Parallel Nippon continues at the Design Exchange (234 Bay St.) until Jan.10.

Special to The Globe and Mail