"In his famous essay In Praise of Shadows, Tanizaki Junichiro starts by explicating the difficulties faced in building a traditional Japanese house which includes all the necessities of modern life: heating, electric lighting and sanitary facilities. Whilst critical of some aspects of modernization, Tanizaki explains that it should be possible to re-create some the of the synaesthetic feelings inherent in traditional architecture without sacrificing certain modern necessities. For instance, he describes the pleasure felt in the Japanese traditional toilet, as it stands "apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss."
[T]here one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones. And the toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of the birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of seasons. Here, I suspect, is where Haiku poets over the ages have come by a great many of their ideas.Despite the possibility of catching a winter cold, Tanizaki suggests that; "our forebears, making poetry of everything in their lives, transformed what by rights should be the most unsanitary room into a place of unsurpassed elegance."...Creating the opportunity for the poetic interpretation of space can be considered the root of architectural creation.
...Tanizaki is not attempting to advocate a return to nature or to the architecture of the past, but rather to find inside ordinary life places than can satisfy both his cultural and aesthetic senses. He then points out that in a Nara or Kyoto temple, "the tearoom many have its charms, but the Japanese toilet is truly a place of spiritual repose." This association may seem surreal but an architect can learn from this perspective that each space of the house, whatever its function may be, should add to the pleasure of dwelling. If not everyone can have a tearoom, at least more ordinary spaces should also be conceived with sensitivity.
The tearoom is a space created for the awakening of both the senses and the mind....Based on the model of the hermitage, the tearoom built inside a town would ideally allow "living in town as if living in the country". The hermitage is described as an impermanent construction, a shelter for one night, built by the scholar himself. A tearoom can be built for a special occasion; it emphasises the ideas of immediateness, "here and now", and the intensity of an instant, an encounter than can only happen "once in one's life." This place condenses both time and space around the art of tea in order to enjoy each instant as if it were the last: it shows both an ethical obligation and an aesthetic appreciation of the impermanent values of space and time. The materiality of the tearoom, the natural essence of materials but also the naturalness of their use, also corresponds to this phenomenological approach to space. Everything is made of natural materials, and materials that express a natural essence.
...Meditation in Zen practice is an attempt to discover the 'essence' of things through an immediate and intuitive, rather than intellectually constructed, method - also the starting point of architectural work.
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