Word: shoji
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...supporters of underground living believe it can be made comfortable with spacious, well-lighted enclosures and liberal use of plants that grow indoors. "Creating an illusion is not so difficult as one might think," says Shoji Takahashi, chief engineer for Asahi Television, which built a studio 66 ft. below Tokyo's fashionable Roppongi district. "When it's raining up there, we use a special shower to create a rainy night in the underground studio...
...group of netsuke (the carved and ornamented toggles that make up a whole category of miniature sculpture in traditional Japan) given to the museum by the San Francisco collector and scholar Raymond Bushell and his wife Frances. The walls are pleats of white translucent plastic made to look like shoji, or paper screens, which filter daylight to the galleries...
Sabi suggests patina or decomposition: the retreat of bright new substance into a world of obscurity and hints. It is what a cypress doorframe acquires after three centuries of sliding the shoji back and forth. It is what Japanese collectors got when they left their silverware to tarnish, instead of polishing it to a bright Tiffany glitter. Wabi is an older and wider concept. It conveys not the dryness and stillness of sabi, but an aristocratic use of "poor," rustic materials. Tea is the origin of much of Japanese design since the 15th century; in fact, the nearest thing...
This combination of cleverness, skill and shibusa, rather than originality, accounts for the excellence of Japanese design. Its continuity extends from the 17th century Katsura Imperial Villa, whose sparse, shoji-screened rooms influenced modern architecture, to the just completed Keio University library; from tatami mats to Sony's new Flamingo record players...
...spaces, the staircase, furniture that doubles as sculpture-that are more palatial than academic but echo traditional Japanese motives. The most unabashedly Japanese of Maki's designs to date, however, are in his 18-bedroom guesthouse for foreign trainees of the YKK zipper-manufacturing concern near Komatsu. Here, shoji, entrance hall, crossbeam and other elements of ancient Japanese architecture are reinterpreted in ways that are at once both strange and familiar...