- Paperback: 96 pages
- Publisher: Stone Bridge Press (1 Nov 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1880656124
- ISBN-13: 978-1880656129
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 14 x 1.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 314,251 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
'The most interesting short book on aesthetics I've read for a long time...' Financial Times, Saturday 12 January --Financial Times, Saturday 12 January
Product Description
From the Introduction
Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
It is a beauty of things unconventional.
The immediate catalyst for this book was a widely publicized tea event in Japan. The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi has long been associated with the tea ceremony, and this event promised to be a profound wabi-sabi experience. Hiroshi Teshigahara, the hereditary iemoto (grand master) of the Sogetsu school of flower arranging, had commissioned three of Japan's most famous and fashionable architects to design and build their conceptions of ceremonial tea-drinking environments. Teshigahara in addition would provide a fourth design. After a three-plus-hour train and bus ride from my office in Tokyo, I arrived at the event site, the grounds of an old imperial summer residence. To my dismay I found a celebration of gorgeousness, grandeur, and elegant play, but hardly a trace of wabi-sabi. One slick tea hut, ostensibly made of paper, looked and smelled like a big white plastic umbrella. Adjacent was a structure made of glass, steel, and wood that had all the intimacy of a highrise office building. The one tea house that approached the wabi-sabi qualities I had anticipated, upon closer inspection, was fussed up with gratuitous post- modern appendages. It suddenly dawned on me that wabi-sabi, once the preeminent high-culture Japanese aesthetic and the acknowledged centerpiece of tea, was becoming-had become?-an endangered species.
Admittedly, the beauty of wabi-sabi is not to everyone's liking. But I believe it is in everyone's interest to prevent wabi-sabi from disappearing altogether. Diversity of the cultural ecology is a desirable state of affairs, especially in opposition to the accelerating trend toward the uniform digitalization of all sensory experience, wherein an electronic "reader" stands between experience and observation, and all manifestation is encoded identically.
In Japan, however, unlike Europe and to a lesser extent America, precious little material culture has been saved. So in Japan, saving a universe of beauty from extinction means, at this late date, not merely preserving particul
Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
It is a beauty of things unconventional.
The immediate catalyst for this book was a widely publicized tea event in Japan. The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi has long been associated with the tea ceremony, and this event promised to be a profound wabi-sabi experience. Hiroshi Teshigahara, the hereditary iemoto (grand master) of the Sogetsu school of flower arranging, had commissioned three of Japan's most famous and fashionable architects to design and build their conceptions of ceremonial tea-drinking environments. Teshigahara in addition would provide a fourth design. After a three-plus-hour train and bus ride from my office in Tokyo, I arrived at the event site, the grounds of an old imperial summer residence. To my dismay I found a celebration of gorgeousness, grandeur, and elegant play, but hardly a trace of wabi-sabi. One slick tea hut, ostensibly made of paper, looked and smelled like a big white plastic umbrella. Adjacent was a structure made of glass, steel, and wood that had all the intimacy of a highrise office building. The one tea house that approached the wabi-sabi qualities I had anticipated, upon closer inspection, was fussed up with gratuitous post- modern appendages. It suddenly dawned on me that wabi-sabi, once the preeminent high-culture Japanese aesthetic and the acknowledged centerpiece of tea, was becoming-had become?-an endangered species.
Admittedly, the beauty of wabi-sabi is not to everyone's liking. But I believe it is in everyone's interest to prevent wabi-sabi from disappearing altogether. Diversity of the cultural ecology is a desirable state of affairs, especially in opposition to the accelerating trend toward the uniform digitalization of all sensory experience, wherein an electronic "reader" stands between experience and observation, and all manifestation is encoded identically.
In Japan, however, unlike Europe and to a lesser extent America, precious little material culture has been saved. So in Japan, saving a universe of beauty from extinction means, at this late date, not merely preserving particul
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
43 of 46 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
So simple--the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete--yet so powerful. A wonderful antidote to the classical Western aesthetic of things massive, enduring, gorgeous, and slick. This book has helped clarify and fine tune my thinking about the various modes of beauty in architecture, my profession.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
a very compact book with essential things to think about and to consider when you create something in design, paintings etc... It is always with me that book and im glad I buy this
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Wabi-sabi is a wonderful book about the impermanence of life, the value of simplicity,the importance of letting go, of that which cannot be perfect because true life is not about perfection. Phylosophical and poetic, it is great reading!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Empty yet Pretty, like a Fabergé Egg
Having discovered this interesting aesthetic, I first did some internet research and then ordered a book. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Dave Redman
The book that should not have been written
Following the precepts promoted in this book it would be an acceptable conclusion to say that perhaps the book should have been so impermanent as to not being printed at all. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Ilynnie
Simple things
While this book did not offer anything remarkably new to me, its message is delivered in a way that is different to the majority. Read more
Published on 28 July 2004 by S. Thomas
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