Wabi Sabi and Beauty
There is a perspective that things that have lived for a long time are worthy of respect and admiration.
Old is more beautiful.
You can’t fake old.
Wabi Sabi.
That Japanese principle of beauty in age comes to a reflection of two principles — rustic utility,
and aged by use
= beauty.
That there is something beautiful to be known in things that have the patina of time — the spattered layering of molecular moments, atomic-strike points and indices that change things forever.
Skin.
Stone.
Wood.
Metal.
Some might call aged objects — ruined. And there is an aesthetic, too, in ruination. Things that have fallen down
in time —
old barns,
office buildings,
memorial sites,
garages,
government and military installations,
gardens,
churches,
abbeys,
monasteries,
cloisters
and nunneries.
While some might find the meditation on ruined sites melancholic, others have written volumes on it.
Rust and ruin?
Others — even we — have commented on the sheer beauty of how rust looks, and works —
especially in applications on Cor-Ten, a steel that holds rust as a kind of aesthetic barrier — once rusted, it bonds that encrustation as a preservative barrier.
What enthralls is
the contemplation of time,
the mysteries of the accretion of wisdom, and of aging slow down,
and see what remains and what might be newly rediscovered in the moment.
Time will tell.
Rain, wave, storm, the ripping wind, they will all grapple an object to
a kind of rusted interpretation,
which might be a peeling to reveal what lies within, or a curling of layers, the spored array of fungi, lichen and mould.
When you look at an old shovel, rusted and long-used, you think — what?
“That shovel is useless now?”
“Someone left that out in the rain?”
Isn’t that beautiful?”
The principles of wabi / sabi espouse that combined an aesthetic joy of rustic utility — beautiful simply-made objects, like tools, that have an elegance
within the primitive mindfulness of
their careful functional making.
Rustic simplicity and utility.
Aged beauty.
Simple and handmade.
Like using an old sunken ship as a — refloated — restaurant:
The Lightship Frying Pan — story:
Ruins and rust, it re-minds me.
And, in fact, drives my aesthetic.
Timothy Shaw Girvin | GIRVIN Laboratories & Libraries | Seattle
…..
GIRVIN | MEDITATIONS ON
APPLE INNOVATION: THE LEGACY OF STEVE JOBS
& APPLE BRANDING [+GIRVIN]
DESIGNING IMAGINATION : AND THE TOOLS TO MAKE IT HAPPEN
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