Dismantling the Kiln
It took a year and a half and a team of potters to completely dismantle Teruo Hara’s kilns at the Japanese House. The potters took apart the kilns, brick by brick, and plan to rebuild them in southern Virginia. Mr. Hara had built a large gas kiln and a small wood fired kiln. And now we’ll begin to rebuild the kiln house as a studio, part […]
Original ‘Hara’ House in 1970s
These are photos from the 1970s when the Hara family lived there, with photos of the kilns and a pottery exhibition in the garden. Click to enlarge.
My Cherry Blossom Tree
Cherry blossom festival is the best week in Washington DC, and always falls on my birthday. I wrote an entire scene in The Fire set during that first week in April. Here is a vase filled with cherry blossoms from my own tree, a 60-foot tall ornamental cherry planted fifty years ago by the famous […]
Relocating the Kiln
As part of the restoration of the Japanese House, a team of professional potters is dismantling Teruo Hara’s historic, hand-built kilns, which will be reassembled at a pre-designed location for continued use. We are documenting the complete deconstruction/reconstruction process. Teruo Hara was a famous potter serving at the Corcoran School (now part of George Washington […]
Mysterious Return of the Bowls
Scott, the director of my heating & plumbing company, sent me a surprise that he’d found in his mother’s attic, along with this story… When Teruo Hara built my Japanese house in 1965, Scott was a child and his own father was Mr Hara’s mortgage banker. In the course of constructing the home & kilns […]
The Mysterious Symbol
The Mysterious Symbol August 8, 2014 Late at night, my first winter in the Japanese house, I was sleeping on cushions on the floor when my resident herd of deer ran through the front courtyard, and set off the motion detector light at the upper entrance, flooding the interior with light. Wearily, I crawled out […]
Wind and Water (Feng Shui)
“Wind and Water” (Feng Shui) There is a system of building design that precedes Neutra’s by millennia: Feng Shui is the ancient oriental art of siting and designing buildings in keeping with key features of the natural landscape, like mountains and valleys created by “winds and waters.” I had studied it for years, including a […]
Heaven & Earth
As layers and years of neglect of the Japanese House were peeled away, something interesting emerged: a vision of “the house within the house.” It was not my vision, however. I am not an expert in Japanese architecture or any other. It was the vision of what the house itself wanted to be. I had […]
Zen is When…
The sounds of Japan are evoked by temple bells, wind chimes, water over stones, wind in bamboo groves, taiko drums (first created, as myth assures us, from a Sake barrel!) – and one of my favorite combinations of all of the above: Jazz Impressions of Japan, the 1964 album of musician Dave Brubeck’s trip to […]
