Forms in Japan

As part of our exploration of material construction and manipulation in this class, you will learn about the ideas of Japanese aesthetician Yuichiro Kojiro, who wrote his influential "Forms in Japan" in 1965. The full text of the book can be found here.

"(The) book ... is a study of the basic shapes that dominate Japanese culture. Kojiro presents us with completed forms, like houses, landscapes, ceramic vessels but it is easy enough to translate them into action: forms of continuation are created by expanding, opening and dilating; forms of union by tying, weaving, bracing, matching; forms of collection by gathering, piling, layering, tightening; forms of arrangmenet by pairing, discarding, scattering; and forms of enclosure by wrapping, surrounding, encircling, covering...." from James Roy King's Remaking the World: Modeling in Human Experience.