Eleventh International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

This paper examines how a group of Zen principles was expressed in a range of traditional East Asian art forms, why these ideas appear to resonate across time and culture, and how they might be manifested in everyday built environments today. The paper argues that these ideas resonate because they reflect the way we are accustomed to seeing materiality manifested in the natural world around us, and it suggests that they can also be effectively expressed in built environments—where most people in the industrialized world now spend the majority of their lives—primarily in the form of incompleteness, economy, continuity, flaw, overlap, aging, and change.