The Kuri, or Kitchen and Living Quarters, of Kinkaku-ji, with its distinctive Zen architecture, is thought to have been constructed during the Meiô and Bunki eras (1492-1504).
Kinkaku-ji (金閣寺), or the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, formally known as Rokuon-ji (鹿苑寺), or the Deer Garden Temple, was the retirement villa of the Ashikaga Yoshimitsu. After his death, it became a the branch temple of the Rinzai-sect Zen temple of Shōkoku-ji.
During the Kamakura period this land was the site of a villa of the aristocrat Saionji Kintsune, known as Kitayamadai. Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (足利 義満), the third Ashikaga shogun (1368-1394) took over the site from the Saionji family period and built his villa, which he called Kitayamadono, in 1397. The complex, whose gardens and architecture centered around a Golden Pavilion, became the center of Kitayama Bunka (北山文化). Kitayama Bunka, or the Kitayama culture of the Muromachi period (室町時代), saw the spread of Song, Yuan and Ming dynasty influences across the flourishing arts and into Japanese society. The grounds were designed according to descriptions of the Western Paradise of the Buddha Amida, intending to illustrate a harmony between heaven and earth. Turned into a temple, under the direction of abbot Musō Soseki (夢窓 疎石), the name Rokuon-ji was taken from the first two characters of the shogun's posthumous name.
During the Ōnin War (1467–1477), all the buildings except for the
Golden Pavilion (金閣), or kinkaku, a three-story, gold-leaf covered pavilion were burned down. The pavilion might have survived a civil war, but it couldn't survive Hayashi Yoken, a mentally ill monk who burned it down in 1950. An exact replicate was reconstructed in 1955.
Kinkaku-ji, along with 16 other locations across Kyōto, Uji and Ōtsu, comprise the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto (Kyoto, Uji and Otsu Cities), designated in 1994.
