Ten years ago in Melbourne, I was brought to a restaurant called BOX. The BOX was in that white walls and grey granite minimalist style grandly culminated in Taniguchi’s MOMA extension in New York. Ten years later, the new 9H capsule hotel in Kyoto feels no different. No, it doesn’t feel fresh anymore. Worse, it feels like an empty dessicated box incapable of giving any sense of joy or wonder or just of being in a particular place. I’ve been in another capsule hotel in Tokyo’s Shibuya where there was a certain casual camaraderie between fellow overnighters in yukatas drinking beer around vending machines. 9H is designed like a straight-forward machine mostly in white Corian and you feel like a global digit: you leave your shoes and bags in lockers; you take your shower in booths, you crawl into your capsule to sleep; you wake up, you leave in a hurry without looking back. The pure clean graphical images of 9H in the internet and the design awards it garnered, tell us something about the character of global design.

Walking around central Kyoto, with its blend of old timber and new modern buildings, I can understand the spirit behind the machine-imagery inspired buildings of Takamatsu Shin and his followers or the carvenous spaces of Hara Hiroshi’s Kyoto Station. These were built during the bubble-economy eighties. They have become part of the streetscape of Kyoto, looking surprisingly fresh in these times.

Still in Kyoto, the timber house of the sculptor Kawai Kanjiro was built by Kawai himself, and his brother, a carpenter by training. He even built a kiln at the back of his house to fire his ceramic works. In his house, his furniture, and his works, we can appreciate his particular choice of colours, his particular curves and lines, his personal world view. Of course he had lived (1890-1966) and worked in an era before what is now known as globalisation.