Space

Urban Cabin Institute produces urban cabin as the following four kinds of space.

1. 01A space in which to converse with art and refine one's sensibility
2. 02A space in which to face oneself and shape a vision
3. 03An extraordinary space, apart from the everyday, where in the half-light one settles the mind and cultivates the energy to run at full pace again tomorrow
4. 04A space for expressing oneself, for hosting and conversing with staff, partners and clients

If you wish to build a tea room, an artful space, or an urban cabin of your own, please get in touch.

Negotiation and dialogue that make use of place and ma (interval) are skills leaders need.

Ichijo Akiyoshi, regent of the Edo period, conducted his conversations while walking through sukiya and around ponds. By repeatedly shifting scene, he staged an interval of tension and release to heighten concentration, sharpening the senses and pacing the interval between small talk and the matter at hand.

In the Muromachi period, there existed a hideaway and social space known as shichu no sankyo. It was a high-end refuge in which visionaries — the most advanced people of cities such as Sakai and Kyoto — could escape the trivial matters of daily life, face themselves, cut through their entanglements to reach decisions, return to their bare selves to organise their thoughts and find inspiration, and switch between on and off.

Behind the home-and-workplace at the heart of the city — shichu — a person kept a rough hut — sankyo — using it to switch on and off, both physically and mentally, and to concentrate on business; this itself was considered the greatest of luxuries.

What was singular, seen from a global perspective, was that while it served as a space for entertaining the powerful, it held up the appearance of a rustic country house as its ideal of beauty. A space in which one could be entirely oneself, unconcerned with others, brought more ease and calm through its simplicity than any display of luxury could.

The origin of shichu no sankyo lies in the longing of Kamakura-period warriors such as Hojo Masako and Minamoto no Sanetomo for the urban spirit and lifestyle of Southern Song China. In the Muromachi period, as emperors, shoguns and other men of power were entertained amid displays of karamono — art from the Song, Yuan and Ming courts — their lifestyle was refined over some three hundred years, moving from Song style toward Japanese taste, and shichu no sankyo reached completion in the Warring States period.

Tokonoma display — four hundred years ahead of Western curation

In this process was born the tokonoma, a uniquely Japanese architectural form for conveying sensibility and message through art. Shichu no sankyo was centred on the tokonoma where art was displayed, forming a social space for hospitality in which one could hold conversation at a higher level than the everyday allowed.

The spatial concept of shichu no sankyo, which placed a work of art at the centre of the space, and the method of selecting a single work for display and appreciation in the tokonoma, were an advanced form of communication unknown in the West until the twentieth century gave rise to the concepts of the "white cube" and "curation".

Shichu no sankyo would go on to specialise into a place for conducting chanoyu. Yamada Sohen, first-generation head of the Yamada family and founder of the Sohen school of tea ceremony, named the space for chanoyu created in the Azuchi–Momoyama period the "kozashiki" — the small chamber — and classified it into types based on the four-and-a-half-mat room.

Today, shichu no sankyo has become synonymous with the tea room, and has lost almost all sense of being a place for hospitality. With the Westernisation of lifestyle, the tea room became a place merely for practising the manners of chado — a stern place of discipline — and shichu no sankyo lost its original significance.

Some four hundred years after shichu no sankyo reached completion, lifestyles changed utterly toward Western style, and Japanese space ceased to be something people longed to create. The character of shichu no sankyo as a hideaway has been supplanted by Western-born lifestyles such as the luxury hotel, and to possess a shichu no sankyo is no longer a luxury. Some architects build structures they call tea rooms, but these use "tea room" merely as a sign — buildings meant to display design rather than luxury, and unusable for chado.

The development of shichu no sankyo requires fusion with new culture. Japan's particularity lies in facing two great powers, China and America, and since shichu no sankyo was born from the Japanisation of Song, Yuan and Ming culture, further development can be expected from fusion with American culture.

Yamada Nagamitsu, founder of Urban Cabin Institute, was born into a family of tea ceremony that upholds shichu no sankyo as tradition, and grew up immersed in the Californian culture that fills Kamakura, with the two fused within him. The point Yamada considers key is the expansion of consciousness that the counterculture within the cabin's context arrived at.

Shichu no sankyo, gazing into the universe within oneself, became a universe as space. This is a concept of time and space that adds, as a spice, the expansion of consciousness born of the counterculture, together with the movements born since, to shape our consciousness of the universe beyond the sky toward which humankind is heading, and to consider our relationship with the Earth.

Yamada named this fusion of Japanese and American culture — a shichu no sankyo 2.0, so to speak — "Urban Cabin", established Urban Cabin Institute, and began offering the space and the experience of time and space that is urban cabin.