it in his time: he made it speak to him. Drawing upon this tradition of hybridity which has its beginning in the dawning age of globaliza- tion, we have developed a tea ceremony that speaks to us in our time in the ebb and flow of cultural exchange occurring at a global level. As with Rikyu, our teahouses are made from ordinary, contemporary materials. They are the language through which the architecture of the teahouse is spoken and therefore must be relevant to the reality of participants using the space. Our teahouses move away from the Japanese influence towards our own tea ceremony. Our first teahouse, Canvas Teahouse (2000), a five foot raw canvas and copper pipe cube, inter- prets a traditional Japanese teahouse (a similar adaptation was created for European audi- ences by Shigeru Uchida titled Tea Houses) . The experience of Canvas Teahouse was one of pri- vacy, people were reluctant to enter the space because the freeplay of social exchange was hindered by the private nature of the materi- als. In a deliberate attempt to circumvent this response the next teahouse, Coroplast Teahouses (2001), used a contemporary commercial sign material. The space of these teahouses was compressed to create a childlike environment, inviting play and the natural social exchanges that accompany play. People jumped in and out of these structures — the feel was of a holiday, where the ordinariness of the world is kept at bay by playful structures. From the simple Japanese influenced cube we literally opened up the space in Teahouse in a Box (2002). An unopened square opens up to reveal a 9’ x 3’ x 4’ tea space made of pine, chipboard, vinyl, aluminum and burlap. One long, late night a group drunkenly drank tea and debated our material choices, concluding that the material mix mirrored a contemporary reality; the melange is what we encounter in our everyday lives. This teahouse encour- aged dialogue because of the openness of the structure, leading us to collapse the structure of the teahouse altogether, creating Tea Garden (2003), an architectural base with four stools which infers space. This has been our most successful teahouse, bridging the cultural traditions of Japanese and North American aesthetics, translating the space into a hybrid experience. Issue of cultural appropriation and hybridity can be thorny, but what is culture for other than to be used and lived? This contradicts the old notion that culture exists in a pure form, that this pure form is the sole possession of any one group. In our opinion culture is the
Underlying our tea ceremony is space, with- out boundaries, for social exchange. The teahouse creates a ritualized space within which cultural and social exchange may occur, outside ordinary life — it is this separateness that makes the space and the exchanges that occur within it special. Ellen Dissanayake observes that [ritual and art] are fashioned with the intent to affect individuals emotionally - to bring their feelings into awareness, to display them. A large part of of the compelling nature of rituals and art is that they are deliberately nonordinary. 1 A realm of the extraordinary is embodied in the physical structure of the teahouse itself. The architecture that bounds this remark- able space removes the bounds of the outside world, resulting in an increased openness on the part of participants in our tea ceremonies. To talk about the response of participants is to talk about the teahouses themselves. Much of our tea ceremony is derived from the sixteenth century Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyu. What we were most impressed by
was Rikyu’s use of everyday materials, which he made special through the act of selecting them and the spontaneity of form in per- forming the tea ceremony. Rikyu’s decisions made the tea ceremony, which at the time was still heavily steeped in Chinese tea tradition, thoroughly Japanese, thereby contextualizing
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local architecture | in a global world
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local architecture | in a global world
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