Preview - Silence and Steel in Kyoto

The house belonged to a retired professor of classical Japanese literature who wanted, paradoxically, nothing Japanese in it. Not as a rejection of his culture but as a relief from it — forty years of scholarship had made him hunger for blankness.

We gave him grey limestone, white plaster, and steel. A single olive tree in the courtyard. The furnishings are almost nothing: a Hans Wegner chair, a low table I made myself in the workshop, a bed. The professor told me the house had cured him of insomnia. I think that is because there is nothing in it that demands his attention.

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