Chapter 1 of 25
Kathryn Findlay (1954 - 2014)
My name's Kathryn Findlay, I have a practice called Ushida Findlay, and I spent 20 years in
Japan, having an oflice there for about 15, and for the last three years trying to swap/switch
cultures and countries and set up a practice in the UK
I suppose the first thing that needs to be explained is really how the experience of living in a
difi‘erent culture, for me, has influenced my work.
The first things to talk about is how the Japanese create space and how that space makes a
kind of total design. The Japanese involve consciously all of the senses when they design.
They are very consciously aware of sound and of smell and of texture as well as what
something looks like.
For instance, there's a painting in Japan, a landscape feature for which there's no authorship,
called a "sui kin katsu". It's a large steel hollow sphere with a hole in the top which is buried in
the ground maybe three centimetres below the surface. And when it rains, the water drips into
this hollow sphere and the sound echoes out. And it's a wonderIul experience because you
hear the sound of water, you are aware of the fact that it's just rained, and it's raining and you
don't see anything. But it's a beautifill way of expressing space.
Another example is a, it's called a "sbishi otoshi" and it's like a bamboo, a hollow bamboo pipe
that's set in a garden on a pivot. I experienced this feature in the Silver temple when I first
went to Japan. And it was such a surprising, delightful experience, it really afi‘ected how I saw
things in Japan. What happens is that there is a stream of water through the garden and it's
channelled onto this pipe, into this hollow pipe. When the water runs into the pipe, at a certain
point there's more water on one side of the pipe on the pivot than the other so it tips up and it's
hollow, it empties itself. And the sound is like, you know, when you get the sound of hollow
bamboo it sounds like ..... whch is lovely. And it makes you realise that space is about
understanding, I suppose, the basic mechanics of something. It's about silence which has a
positive connotation, it’s pregnant with possibilities. And the space is punctuated with
regularly absolute precision, time is then punctuated. And it make you feel that, as a designer
and as an architect, you ought to be very aware of all of the senses when you design. And
that's very much part of Japanese culture. And I suppose, with my art background — I went to
art school for a little while before I went to architecture school — this struck a very very strong
chord with me.