num_pages: 240
description: The Modern Japanese Tea Room showcases chashitsus  traditional Japanese tea ceremony salons as reconceived by contemporary architects and designers. The formal tea ceremony developed in the fifteenth century and its ritual is closely defined as is the space for traditionally chashitsus include windows an alcove ( tokonoma ) with flowers and painted parchment bamboo beds ( tatami ) and a fireplace on the floor ( ro ); they do not include furniture in part because they are spaces for meditation. More recently those traditions--as closely associated with the upper class as high tea is in England and its colonies--have been rediscovered by architects and designers as a perfect match for their contemporary work. The Modern Japanese Tea Room includes projects from renowned Japanese names including Kengo Kuma Terunobu Fujimori Shigeru Uchida Arata Isozaki Chitoshi Kihara Yasujirou Aoki and Hisanobu Tsujimura. Their work in a wide variety of materials--paper wood plastic aluminum glass concrete--represents the latest and most inspiring in Japanese architecture and interior design from a tree house in Nagano to a portable space in black lacquer.The Modern Japanese Tea Room opens with an introduction to the history of the tea ceremony identifying its physical elements and going over to the ceremony itself and then moves on to more than 35 projects gathered together in 250 of Michael Freeman's powerful color images. A tribute to contemporary Japanese culture and a taste of its future.
language: English
title: The Modern Japanese Tea Room
publisher: Damiani