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
