Symbiotic Beauty: The Sustainable Wisdom of Samurai Residences
Learn how the samurai house of the Edo period offered a symbiotic linkage of house and garden.
Lectures
Azby Brown, a leading authority on Japanese architecture, design, and environmentalism, explains how the samurai house of the Edo period was a marvelous design solution that embodied the aesthetics of comfortable restraint and the ethics of wasteless use of materials and energy. Conceived from the start as a symbiotic linkage of house and garden, samurai residences provide us with many ideal models for circular design that is highly applicable to our own age. This talk will look at The Huntington’s Japanese Heritage Shōya House, placing it in context with the values and practices of the era in which it was built and highlighting the many continuities it displays across centuries and social hierarchies.