This Here Now: Japanese Building and the Architecture of the Individual by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Assistant Professor of Architecture Kevin Nute, shows how buildings in general can help us both affirm and transcend our individuality.
This Here Now explores how traditional Japanese buildings acknowledge unique materials, objects and events, and argues that the built recognition of singular phenomena can serve to affirm the individuality of all being, including our own. The book also explains how buildings can help us overcome our separateness by enabling us to share the normally subjective experiences of this, here and now.
"I wanted to show that our built surroundings can help to affirm the nature of being in general, and our own in particular," said Nute. "I hope that readers will gain an understanding that all being, including our own, is individual: a combination of shared and unique characteristics that makes each of us both inherently valuable and interdependent."
Prior to joining UH Mānoa in 2019, he was a professor of architecture at the University of Oregon, and previously an associate professor at a national university in Japan.
His other books include Naturally Animated Architecture, John Yeon and the Landscape Arts of China and Japan, Place, Time and Being in Japanese Architecture, and Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan.
This Here Now is published by World Scientific, publishers of the Nobel Lectures, and can be purchased online.
