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Speaker: Azby Brown, author of: Just Enough; Small Spaces; ...
Topic: Living Green in Edo
When: Starting at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, 28 March 2010
Admission: Buy a copy of Just Enough from Good Day Books
Azby Brown, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, is the director of the KIT Future Design Institute in Tokyo. He studied architecture and sculpture at Yale College, graduating in 1980. In 1985, under a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education, he entered the Department of Architecture of the University of Tokyo, where he received his master's degree in 1988 and completed his doctoral research in 1995. 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), all published by Kodansha International. He became an associate professor of architectural design at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology in 1995, and currently holds a position there in the Department of Media Informatics.
His most recent book, Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan (Kodansha International, 2010), is a book of stories and sketches that depict vanished ways of life from the point of view of a contemporary observer. Just Enough tells how people lived in Japan some two hundred years ago during the late Edo period, when traditional technology and culture were at their peaks, just before Japan opened itself to the West and joined the ranks of the industrialized nations.
Only a few centuries earlier, Japan's environment had been pushed to the brink of disaster by overly aggressive use of natural resources. Overcoming many of the problems of energy, water, materials, food, and population that confront us today, Japan's government and people not only forged a society that was conservation-minded, waste-free, well-housed, well-fed, and economically robust, but also bequeathed to us admirable and enduring standards of beauty and design.
To attend Azby Brown's BookNotes presentation on 28 March 2010, you must purchase a copy of Just Enough from our shop. Hardcover copies of Just Enough are available at Good Day Books for two thousand nine hundred ninety three yen („2993) each, tax included.
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