Breathing Space

I am in love with this image, just the sheer possibility of a space such as this. It makes you want to breathe more deeply.

Recently, reading about a new show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, called Small Spaces, I came across the architecture of Terunobu Fujimori whose work I find beautiful in its simplicity, its quiet unpretentious airiness. The tea houses he builds all give a feeling of away-ness too, a sensation strangely akin to the one I feel whenever I watch Woody Allen's rather underappreciated A Midsummer's Night Sex Comedy (1982).





Here is Fujimori in his takasugi-an, literally 'a tea house too high', the construction and the lay out of which you can read about here. From what I can tell, his buildings all involve these tea houses as centrepieces.



'There is here no measuring with time, no year matters and the years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am gratful: patience is everything.'--Rilke 23 April 1903



Apparently, they built the entire house used is Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy from scratch, especially for the film. Its dacha-like detachment, its cool sombreness (perhaps reinforced by the lack of electrical fixtures) is something I find incredibly alluring, everytime I watch. It's like being welcomed in from the upstate New England heat, a little light-headed, and being offered a glass of lemonade and a spot to recline.