Word: katayama
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...Katayama said that the heights of the holding vehicle for the chairs were kept low so as not to interfere with the space of the roof area and over-power the chairs. The pattern of lines incised into the cement floor is taken into account and even the accordion walls holding windows and louvres at the back of the room are used to display furniture. All is appropriate and sufficient, no more. Katayama takes van der Rohe's maxim "less is more" as his own--his aim is to parry and eliminate, always saying with the barest essentials more than...
...Although Katayama has succeeded in graphically linking an architect to an industrial designer, he himself rejects the separation of artists into such categories as architect, graphic designer, sculptor and painter. He describes himself as a "designer of spaces," using colors and materials which are themselves less important than the spaces he creates and manipulates...
Aside from the conscious and obvious deference Katayama shows to Le Corbusier's building, there are more subtle relationships between the two designers. Katayama's white panel boxes have no curves, only planes and right angles that are contraforms to set off the flows in Thonet's wood. One wonders if Katayama had in mind Le Corbusier's statement that "the right angle is the primordial sign of the ordering and organizing spirit." And just as Carpenter Center has no real front or back--its axis diagonal to Quincy Street and entrance buried in the middle--so too Katayama...
This is no museum of rooms in a row with an open corridor of door-ways--it is one space in which Katayama's design moves in all directions and shows many good faces. Were his wooden compartments empty--and Katayama never conceived of them without their chairs--it would still be a brilliant creation of light and space in motion...
Nothing less than the total space is Katayama's concern here. He says that the table and chair where the guard sits, even the clock on that table are as much a part of his design as the conscious making of white space in the Thonet poster...