why all the rectangles?

why all the rectangles?

kenya hara is japan’s preeminent designer. you could call him their design laureate. he is both a designer and a design philosopher. for the past year, i have been reading his books. it is reading that requires concentration. it makes my head hurt. and i love every minute of it. i made this photo today, to illustrate a quote i underlined recently. (yes, i am an underliner. don’t judge.)

“Humans have designed their world in rectangles. We have divided the organic earth into rectangles, laying down rectangular streets lined with rectangular buildings. We enter these buildings through rectangular doors, and ascend and descend in rectangular elevators. Turning right angles down rectangular hallways, we open rectangular doors to reveal rectangular rooms…Why have we designed our world like this? You find very few rectangles in nature. The mathematics of four is not unknown in nature, but because the square is very unstable, there seem to be few concrete examples of it.”  ~Kenya Hara in Designing Japan

it makes one wonder. why are we so enamored with a shape that we probably did not evolve to appreciate?  hara thinks it has to do with the fact that straight lines and right angles are among the easiest shapes for us to create with the fewest tools. i wonder if it is simply that humans are more or less rectangular shaped, and we like to create the world in our own image.

  • celia says:

    And as humans we are ever-connected to our rectangular devices. At least our charging cables and power cords are wonderfully curvy!

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little tigers

little tigers

my husband has been rereading marcel pagnol’s memoir “the glory of my father.”  in the story, the young marcel’s mother is terrified of “les microbes,”  or germs, because, “the great Pasteur had just recently invented them.” steve translated a passage from the book the other night, in which marcel’s mother imagines germs as little tigers, ready to devour her children from the inside. i think dried clematis flowers are a pretty good approximation of what these “petits tigres”  must have looked like inside the head of the simple, loving, and terrified augustine pagnol, who scrubbed everything new that entered her house with bleach.

dried clematis

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winter weary

winter weary

only two more months to the vernal equinox. not that i am counting or anything. i’m not saying that my skin is as dry as these thistle leaves, or that my extremities feel as frosted and brittle. i’m not saying that. exactly.

winter thistle stem and leaves

 

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self portrait

self portrait

i started trying to figure out what exactly i was doing in this improvised twiggy self-portrait, and the possibilities became endless. conducting the orchestra, i thought. throwing out the first pitch at the ballgame. telling my son to get back here this instant. hanging laundry. telling someone to “talk to the hand. directing rush hour traffic. singing in the rain. serving the ball at 40-15. getting ready to hug my daughter when she gets off the plane. thanking the universe for all of you. i’ll let you decide which it is.

winter branches of red elderberry

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wordless writing

wordless writing

asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content”, or “without the smallest unit of meaning.” in other words, it is the form of writing without the content. but it also has to look enough like traditional writing so as not to be confused with abstract visual art. after that, it is up to the “reader” to supply whatever meaning or connections there might be in the shapes that are not exactly writing but not exactly art, but hint in certain ways at both. i don’t particularly like ending posts with leading questions, like “what do you see here?” because i think that trope has been exhausted on a zillion clickbait instagram posts. but if you think this qualifies as asemic writing, or is simply a composed abstraction, i’d be interested. winter stems trying not to say something
  • papelhilo says:

    I love that I always learn something with your posts ! thanks to you, I’m very interested in exploring asemic writing !

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  • Carol says:

    It says: stop the world I want to get off – please laugh – very interesting, as usual

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  • Laura Short says:

    This very much reminds me of Byzantine musical notation; something still used in Greek and Antiochian Orthodox churches. (http://www.hcsri.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Byzantine-music-notation.png)

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