As social animals, we are forced into constant acts of duplicity. Certain situations demand that we act ebullient when we feel depressed, polite when we feel hatred, social when we feel hermetic. Such is the conflicted nature of the social mask. Exchanging these masks at a moment's notice seems to be
Geoffrey Bawa doesn't work without first reading the lines of the land, the influence of the climate, the kinds of things that grow here or there. His is an architecture that conforms as it adorns. He thinks through the landscape, opens space up to it, lets the outside mingle within. His structures a
When Toshiyuki Kita graduated from Naniwa College, Osaka, in 1964, he immediately became a furniture designer. After working in Italy for designers Mario Bellini and
Silvio Coppola, he quickly built a reputation as one of the "most European" of Japanese designers. This reputation stands today, as he
Out of the cross-dressed history of Japanese Kabuki and Noh theater comes Takarazuka Revue, a butch/femme drag show of mammoth proportions. The 86-year-old revue renders Western musicals in an all-girl extravaganza of romance and chivalry.
In 1914 Ichizo Kobayashi, a Hankyu railway magnate, founded