Art in the Garden Lecture: Just Enough:
Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan, Author Azby Brown
Friday, January 28, 2011
5:30-7:30pm; Pavilion
SOLD OUT
Call with questions: (503) 542-0280
Inspired by his first visit to Katsura Imperial Villa in the 1980s, Tokyo-based author Azby Brown went on to pursue a career in architectural design, ultimately writing The Genius of Japanese Carpentry and a number of other successful books, including Small Spaces, The Japanese Dream House, and The Very Small Home. A graduate of Yale, Brown is a professor of 
architectural design at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology, and founder and director of the Future Design Institute in Tokyo. His presentation will be on his latest book, Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan, published in 2010.
Through words and sketches, Just Enough tells how people lived 200 years ago during the late Edo period in Japan, when traditional technology and culture were at the peak of development, just before the opening of Japan to the West. Brown shows how people in the 18th-19th centuries dealt with some of the same issues we are facing today—energy, water, materials, food, and population—and forged from these challenges a society that was conservation-minded, waste-free, well-housed, well-fed, and economically robust, and that has bequeathed to us enduring standards of art and beauty.
The lecture will include reflections on Katsura Imperial Villa as the inspiration for Brown’s lifelong career in Japanese architecture and design, as well as his insights into the lessons to be learned from traditional Japan on ways of living green in a densely populated urban society.
A book-signing will follow the lecture. Buy the book here!
Azby Brown:
A native of New Orleans, Louisiana, Azby Brown is an artist and designer who has lived in Japan since 1985. He is the author of The Genius of Japanese Carpentry (1995), Small Spaces (1996), The Japanese Dream House (2001) and The Very Small Home (2005). His most recent book, Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan was published in 2010. On the faculty of the Kanazawa Institute of Technology since 1995, he is the director of the KIT Future Design Institute in Tokyo.
Read More: Essay by Azby Brown on The Design Observer Group website.