The Ise Shrines at Naiku and Geku, near Nagoya, highly refined idealizations of ancient agricultural storehouses, have been rebuilt at least sixty-one times since first being established. The entire twenty-year building cycle is a continuous, precisely defined ritual. The result is unlike any religious structure in the world, one that is always new, and at the same time over a millenium old.
He was sort of underway by then...he had this whole ritual for showing the work to people – you had to sit in a chair that was positioned what he felt was exactly the right distance from the painting. There was a certain mystique about it that worked for him.
Black rakuware tea bowl (late sixteenth century), Kyoto, Japan. Freer Sackler Museum of Asian Art.
For Irwin, the lesson of [the raku tea cups] was twofold: first, their presentation was important, insofar as the ceremony involved a gradual preparation of the audience's aesthetic attention. Then, when the time came to handle the cups, the intimacy of the experience fused visual and tactile sensations into a single continuum. As he also noted:
he would set on the table this box with a beautiful little tie on it – very Japanese – and you untied it, you opened up the box, he let you do that. And then inside of it was a cloth sack. You took the sack out, and it had a drawstring, and you opened up the drawstring and you reached inside and took out the bowl. By that time, the bowl had you at a level where the most incidental detail – maybe even just a thumb mark – registered as a powerful statement.
I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.
Even a dwelling is a device that generates a distinct pattern of daily activities and their relationships. Some buildings are explicitly built for ritual, but the repetition of any activity, either mundane or religious, tends to ritualize them, and by facilitating this, an architectural structure can turn gradually – sometimes even unnoticeably – into an instrument of ritual.
The association of comfort with people and place are reinforced by the ritualized use of a place. Using a place at a set time and in a specific manner creates a constancy as dependable as the place itself. It establishes, in time and behavior, a definition of place as strong as any architectural spatial definition, such as an aedicula, might be. Ritualized use can do more than reinforce the affection for a place. Through ritual, a place becomes an essential element in the customs of a people.
Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture provided seven guides, or 'lamps', for the troubled craftsman, guides for anyone who works directly on material things. These seven are:
The lamp of sacrifice: The willingness to do something well for its own sake.
The lamp of truth: The truth that 'breaks and rents continually'; Ruskin's embrace of difficulty, resistance, and ambiguity.
The lamp of power: Tempered power, guided standards other than blind will.
The lamp of beauty: Which for Ruskin is found more in the detail, the ornament—hand-sized beauty—than in the large design.
The lamp of life: Life equating with struggle and energy, death with deadly perfection.
The lamp of memory: The guidance provided by the time before machinery ruled.
The lamp of obedience: Obedience to the example set by a master's practice rather than by his particular works; otherwise put, strive to be like Stradivari but do not seek to copy his particular violins.