Word: katsura
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...many respects, Katsura Okiyama is a typical Japanese woman in her 20s. The mother of one enjoys spending time with her friends and loves Disney. But, less typically, she is a writer. And, quite exceptionally, her medium is not a PC or even pen and paper. It's her cell phone...
...spring, Dutch bulbs burst out at Keukenhof. April sees the gardens of the Neapolitan Riviera lovely and fresh before the summer heat. July and August hold the promise of drowsy afternoons and long evenings in Oxford's Christ Church Meadows. In the fall, a permit for the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto is the best way to see Japan's fiery autumnal foliage. And when all is dreary in the north, there's always Cape Town's Kirstenbosch Gardens, or New Zealand's Ellerslie Flower Show in November-the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere. Check out these...
...pattern-oriented design sensibility of traditional Japanese textiles. Often his splashy tableaux resemble spread-out kimonos. Typically, as in Untitled, 1985, they are covered with an obsessive, all-over rash of heavily impastoed, drippy dots. Far less theatrical but also keenly focused on subject matter and technique, sculptor Katsura Funakoshi creates blank-faced portraits of everyday people whose looks betray neither race nor nationality. Made from camphorwood, his torsos are as skillfully carved as the ancient Buddhist sculptures whose construction they recall. Psychologically intense, they are also a little bit spooky...
...stood for, became an obsession with younger architects at Tokyo University. In 1954 Walter Gropius came to Japan to give a series of lectures, only to discover that an extraordinary loop of adaptation had taken place. What Gropius liked in Japan was its traditional architecture, epitomized by the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. The kind of modernism he stood for was heavily indebted to Japanese sources, transmitted to Germany nearly 50 years before by Frank Lloyd Wright, not just in details or quotations of carpentry, but in fundamentals, such as the open plan and the design of furniture. Thus...
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...