After graduating from the AA, the Scottish born architect Kathryn Findlay spent 20 years in Japan. In 1987 she set up in partnership there with Eisaku Ushida. Now she is back in London, faced with the switch in cultures and its influence on her work.
The Japanese, she says, see the creation of space as a total design involving all the senses. "What is solid and what is temporary becomes much more gradual and fused, and begins to make you more aware of invisible forces, energy, factors that create spaces".
Curvilinear, fluid and flowing forms are the basis of most of Ushida and Findlay's work, merged with spiral geometry into one organic object. Continuous primary surfaces link the interior and exterior of a house whose shape is formed around a meandering route generated by the circulation system. Large spaces may dissolve into smaller spaces and merge into the landscape. Familiar materials are used in unfamiliar ways to give a twist to the sense of reality. The invisible is made tangible. Such concepts are illustrated in the projects described by Kathryn Findlay in her talk.
Kathryn Findlay died, aged 60, in 2014.
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