The reality of the building One day I went to my study at Taliesen to sit down and rest. I picked up a little book just received from the ambassador to America from Japan. It was called The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo. I wonder how many of you have read it? Well, in that little book I came upon quotations from the great Chinese poet-prophet Laotze, things he had said five hundred years before Jesus. As I turned the pages I suddenly came across this: "The reality of the building does not consist in the four walls and the roof but in the space within to be lived in..." The answer is, reality is the space within, into which you can put something. In other words, the idea. And so it is with architecture; so it is with your lives; and so it is with everything you can experience as reality. You will soon find out for yourselves if you begin to work with this principle in mind, that things will open to you...Therein lies the secret of great peace, missing in Western Civilization today. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Book of Tea space
Putting Thought Into Things An Essay by Oliver Reichenstein ia.net Building structure requires serious listening, serious reflection, and serious imagination. All this requires experience, and no matter how experienced you are, it costs you. We spend our time and nerves to save users their time and nerves. Well-designed things give us the invaluable present of time. Well-designed products do not just save us time, they make us enjoy the time we spend with them. They make us feel that someone has been thinking about us, that a nice person took care of the little things for us. This is mainly why we perceive well-designed things as more beautiful the longer we use them, and the more used they become. By the handling of human hands craftproductsage