Word: designer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Japanese style? Japan is a wild hodgepodge of gimcracky downtowns and kitschy international design ideas mixed and mismatched, its capital a shrill, Blade Runner mess of traffic, shabby office buildings and meretricious Architectural Statements. Consumer products are bland or bizarre, and in graphics anything goes...
Both visions of modern Japanese design are correct. Where on the one hand there is Tokyo, on the other there is Kyoto, the perfect religious city. On street corners and in train stations are impeccably printed surreal posters that seem only incidentally to be advertising, but in the pages of magazines there is artsy typographical chaos. There are delightfully showboating aluminum office towers (such as Fumihiko Maki's Spiral building in Tokyo) as well as brand-new buildings made entirely of secondhand wood (Atsuo Hoshino's House of Used Lumber, on the outskirts of Tokyo). The familiar and the provocative...
Graphic and Stage Set Designer Eiko Ishioka, who has also worked in the U.S., is just as sanguine about the creative boom: "Japanese design is more flourishing and diverse than ever before." At no time in the roughly 130 years that Japan has traded with the West have its applied arts been so influential abroad. "I've lived with Asian influence all my life," says Eugene Kupper, an architect and UCLA professor, but "today Japan is in the forefront. It's the most exciting it has ever been." While tradition clearly informs some of the best new Japanese design...
...hard determining fact of all Japanese culture, including design, is the country's size and island insularity. Land in Tokyo goes for as much as $846.7 million an acre. Thus an architect's treatment of space takes on a sort of moral dimension. Isozaki was condemned by some compatriots for the spaciousness of an art museum he designed in the early '70s. Now that he is busy with American commissions, Isozaki himself is a bit thrown by the comparative Yankee boundlessness. "In the U.S.," he says, "even where I had thought I might be taking up too much space...
...most of its 15-year history, Cray Research of Minneapolis has dominated the market for supercomputers, those $15 million, lightning number crunchers used for everything from the search for oil deposits to the design of nuclear weapons. The company has boasted two star computer engineers: Founder Seymour Cray, 62, and Steve Chen, 43, the Chinese-born immigrant who designed the Cray X-MP, the company's best-selling machine. Last weeksupercomputerdom's best and brightest duo decided to split up. In a move that shocked the investment community -- and sent Cray's stock tumbling 8 1/2 points in a single...