Word: zens
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Japanese style? Japan is all about aesthetic discipline and refinement: it is a tidy place where ordinary buildings are Zen compositions, where cities fit together as ingeniously as a GoBot, a place where restraint and respect for tradition (rock gardens, ikebana, interior space denominated in tatami mats) come naturally, where advertising aspires to art, where even the landscape seems well designed...
Tadao Ando, 45, is the most influential figure among Japan's baby-boomer architects. Combative, ascetic, a radical traditionalist, he is the perfect maverick: after wandering across the U.S. in the '60s, he aspired to a professional boxing career before becoming an architect. He is something of a Zen zealot. He hates "automated buildings with all manner of electronic convenience." He hates posh materials. "Concrete, far cheaper than marble, can achieve a far greater spiritual sense of wealth," he says. Indeed, most of his 90 buildings are constructed of concrete. Ando is thus maintaining a tradition: large-scale modern buildings...
...simple but technically complex." A 1985 poster for a company that makes Buddhist religious articles, for instance, features a high-resolution close-up of a human bone, drenched in dark powder and standing all alone and upright against a white background. In small letters at the bottom is the Zen koan-like non- slogan: "I am an ancestor of the future...
...Shiro Kuramata, 52, a furniture and interior designer with a considerable reputation in Europe as well as Japan. His boutiques around the world for Issey Miyake are black chain-link nests. The feel Kuramata seems to be after is a kind of monastery for 21st century hipsters, a futuristic Zen...
...trained monk who can throw a baseball 168 m.p.h with unfailing accuracy. Sidd, short for Siddhartha, joins the New York Mets in spring training and hooks up with Debbie Sue, a Florida beachgirl and playmate of porpoises. Plimpton employs real Mets as characters, digresses into baseball lore, horn playing, Zen and the art of pitching, and the emotional state of the narrator. It is all gracefully done but tends to take the reader's eye off the ball, or rather the fact that there is not much ball. An agreeably plotless pastime, Sidd Finch should appeal to minor league mystics...