![]() Hong Kong Former British colony (China SAR).Guangzhou The capital and the largest city of Guangdong province in southern China.When you start looking, the influence of Japanese esthetics on contemporary design is everywhere. ![]() George Nakashima's Conoid Dining Table builds upon the organic properties of the wood, and Isamu Noguchi’s modern coffee table expresses a “there-and-not-there,” abstract, biomorphic sensibility. Tansu-as-stairway to border the living room. In furniture the influence is equally strong, with a stairstep tansu, for example, contributing important DNA to work by architects like Steve Mats and shoji screens defined space without walls. Parallels between the open plan tenets of Modernism and the way tatami Toward the middle of the 20th century architects saw compelling And of course he designed the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, completed in the early 1920s and which survived the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, when much of Tokyo was heavily damaged. The Japanese Pavilion or Ho-o-den at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, which Pasadena architect brothers Charles Sumner and Henry Mather Greene saw in the year they opened their practice, absorbing ideas like expressed joinery and garden connections that would ultimately flower in their Craftsman bungalows of the early 20th century.įrank Lloyd Wright was another early devotee and famously became bothĬollector and seller of graphically powerful, almost abstract Japanese The influence of Japanese design in the US began most forcefully with Successive generations of architects and designers (not to mention “the equivalent of an extensive machine for arousing all our imaginativeįacilities.” Such monuments have been rediscovered and reinterpreted by Of overlapping styles, spatial arrangements, and literary allusions: That the buildings and garden of Katsura form an ambiguous composition (MIT Press, 2006, 2011), the eminent architect Arata Isozaki explains In his fascinating book Japan-ness in Architecture Perceive more sharply the constituent parts of the composition and ![]() The journey through the complex makes you The villa buildings are equally eloquent in their forms, functions, and seamlessĬonnections to the landscape. Every step and view appears planned: you look down to pay attention to the stone path you are treading and then look up to see another special tree or view across the lake. Orchestrated promenade where the control of sights and spatial experience is everything, from the structurally expressive bamboo fence at the entrance to the painterly Nut Pine tree flanked by hedges. The cold light outlined gravel furrows and the grain of the wood andĪt the Imperial Villa of Katsura (17th century) not farĪway, which I also toured, the experience is very different: an Garden was the world and the world was the garden. Gravel sea with its 15 stones-as-islands. ![]() Was only one other person on the wooden steps overlooking the raked When I visited many years ago it was early in the morning and for a few minutes there Remember the great Zen Buddhist Ryoan-ji Dry Garden at Kyoto, shown above. Japanese design has always stimulated creative thought. So here is a brief toast to the Japanese imagination. The terrible earthquake and tsunami of 2011 made me want toĪrticulate my unshakable faith in Japan as an extraordinarily creativeĪnd resilient and influential force in the world of architecture andĭesign. ![]()
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