Scope For Money

The company's first mark in the country will be with a three-level facility in Tokyo's trendy Minami Aoyama area this fall, noted Dominique Conseil, president of Aveda, who visited here in May to announce the official launch of the brand to the Japanese market. The space will include a shop and cafe on the first floor and a salon and spa on the second floor and basement, respectively.

Global expansion for the brand has been a goal of Aveda's parent, the Estee Lauder Cos., since it purchased the lifestyle brand in December 1997. And with this launch, Aveda has a president who's at home in the market: before assuming the presidency of Aveda in July 2000, Conseil had previously been president

Mazda's commercialization of the Miller-cycle engine, an invention dating back to the 1940s, got more Japanese media attention than any single advance in fuel conservation. The engine generates 1.5 times the torque of a traditional engine of the same displacement, while improving fuel efficiency 10 to 15{a9573bd3aa901309c1f5fce5b559a91687eda4f627635006bb3caa1474469022}. In the Miller cycle, the compression stroke is shortened to attain a small compression ratio with a large expansion ratio. The engine achieves both low compression ratios and high expansion ratios by delaying the close-timing of the intake valves. To compensate for the decreased amount of intake air, caused by the delay of the closing intake valves, a Lysholm compressor pushes a large volume of compressed air into the cylinder with a screw-type rotor mechanism. Mazda's KJ-ZEM Miller-cycle engine is a 24-valve V6 DOHC model with a bore of 80.3 mm, stroke of 74.2 mm, displacement of 2,254 cc, actual compression ratio of 8.0, maximum torque of 30.0 kg-m/3,500 rpm, power output of 220 ps/5,500 rpm, and high expansion ratio of 10. The Lysholm compressor sits in the V-bank between the cylinder blocks and is driven by a V-belt. Rotors take air in and compress it by a factor of two. A 1.5 X increase in air volume goes to the combustion chamber even if a portion returns to the inlet manifold because of the delayed closing of the inlet valves.

Hydrogen powered

Mazda employed a hydrogen rotary engine on its HR-X2 concept vehicle that contains several improvements compared to commercially available versions. Most interesting is the improved torque in the low-to-mid rpm range. Mazda

In 1993 the Japanese architect Shigeru Uchida designed three cube-like teahouses that were easy to assemble, dismantle, and move. The differences between the three boxes--each roughly 8 feet square and 7 feet high--lay in Uchida's treatment of the defining element of all Japanese structures: the lattice wall. According to Uchida, what distinguishes Japanese from Western building is the notion of kekkyu-- boundaries. These range in hierarchy from a painted line or a stone at a threshold to a solid fortress wall. In between these is the lattice, a perforated barrier through which a passerby may catch a glimpse of private acts. Among his three teahouses, Ji-an ("house of perception") is an elegant patchwork of square and vertical grids, Gyo-an ("house of memories") has slats intersecting in a tangle of triangles through which the night sky appears as through a dizzying mesh of stars, and So-an ("house of composition") features gridded wall with a vertical emphasis calmly alternating with walls composed purely o f squares. The interiors glow from the golden wood of which they are made. As the late literary and cultural critic Roland Barthes once wrote, "Wood...produces a world of objects easy on the eyes, already human by their substance, resistant but not brittle, constructible but not plastic." Though strikingly modern, Uchida's structures are redolent of what Barthes called "a more vegetal age."

This year, Uchida's teahouses are traveling to museums and design centers throughout Germany. Their curator is Georg Wawerla, a designer in Kiel, who worked with Uchida and the late Aldo Rossi on the Mochiko Hotel in Japan and