Chair in Room    1981

For so many years I ignored people. I explored construction, materials and tools. I had forgotten that human activity was an essential component of architecture. Perhaps it was too difficult to draw people. Chairs were easy to build and easy to draw. A model of a chair could represent a person and its use activity. Chair in Room, 1981, was a major turning point in my work in that it helped me to define ceremony and ritual.
When many people commented on the Japanese look of my work, I decided to investigate. The librarian at New Jersey Institute of Technology where I was teaching at the time gave me some photographs of a tea house that made my heart race. This was very exciting. At RISD we were required to take Western Art and Ideas. There wasn’t a course known as Eastern Art and Ideas.
Cage in his writings spoke often of D.T. Suzuki’s, Zen Buddhism. I read Suzuki. I visited the Uresenke Tea Ceremony Society. I poured over images of Katsura Palace.