true blue

During the feudal era of Japan, Kanazawa's ruling Maeda-clan convinced the local samurais to stop fighting and instead practice arts and hone their various crafts. A tactical decision by the Maedas, the instruction pacified the samurais and led to 400 years of peace. Kanazawa laid free from fighting. An early version of mediation through making, it led to an unwitting take on non-violence. Deeply connected to craft, the warriors turned clay into bowls, practiced the tea-ceremony and clad its elevated huts' walls with mineral plaster, posing no threat to the Maedas. To the samurais it was make stucco, not war. Still standing, their Machiya houses- or house of craftspeople, rose from wood, clay, paper, straw, some in stones and stucco, in the Nagamachi district in Kanazawa.

When I was 16 I would wake up in such a house built in the 17th century one morning after another. The first thing I saw was a wall covered in a mineral plaster shimmering in a saturated, pure blue with bits of mica. A kind of natural glitter, mica, is a mineral which separates into layers and flakes also known as kirazuri when used in stucco or woodblock prints. That faintly glittering blue held my gaze. I never tired of its blue-ness because every morning, the wall came alive again. December’s thin ray of sun played across the surface, picking up the light. Spare, but sumptuous, the blue wall quieted the room. Reduced to tatami mats and paper doors the bedroom grew into a palace. Simplicity somehow begat spaciousness. During winter, it was a difficult house to live in when the snow piled onto the black glazed ceramic roof. A house made from wood and paper cannot have central heating. To keep warm, I and the Tsuji-samas- the direct descendants of a centuries old gold-leaf craft family business, huddled around the kodatsuno, a table covered in a stuffed blanket hiding a sunken floor. Below, an ancient heater of a cast iron bowl filled with live embers glowed in the shadows. Looking to the right, mud walls encased a hidden garden mimicking nature, a wild landscape tamed into mountains made from not so large boulders, a stream of a waterfall and a forest in miniature in maple trees. Throughout the house, segments of lime plasters tinted parts of the walls in ochre, iron reds and blues. Unvarnished wood of discrete exclusivity held a house standing for centuries by joinery without screws, nuts or bolts. Rothko could have lived in that house, so still but teeming was the living quality of the mineral plaster and the unvarnished wood. Cold but content, I breathed well in Tsuji-sama´s antique house. Counter such a house with the modern Japanese house with its hard, dead surfaces from resin flooring to vinyl chloride wall paper. A plastic house induces migraine. A Machiya house invites sensuous knowing and teaches connection with honest materials, shaped to an almost perverse level as the Japanese practice a craft by knowing that materials, well-being and craftsmanship is interdependent care.

To colour a house is an art and a highly subjective perceptive ability. Seemingly ultra-marine, the blue of the artist Yves Klein is a blend to summon the immaterial, and the infinite representing his utopian vision of a boundless world. According to Klein, his first encounter with an art work was the blue sky. Pure blue, or any other absolute colour embodies a kind of truth. Filling a room with a generous blue, it shows how emptiness becomes form. To me, a room in Kanazawa enclosed the world.

Blue, then is a leap into the void. Approaching Klein's canvases, the quality of the colour seems timeless, an eternally repeated twilight, L'Heure Bleue- neither full daylight nor utter darkness - a moment of a world tinted blue to let the spirits roam free. Klein Blue holds a supposedly primeval purity. Scraping beneath the surface, utopia falls apart. Using a synthetic resin matt binder, Klein Blue suspends the colour by allowing the pigment to retain as much as possible its original qualities and intensity through a plastic binder. Not a pretty name as Klein Blue, the scientific component of the resin in the binder is a polyvinyl acetate sold as Rhodopas M or M60A. So often, magic is a sales pitch. And truth and fact are different things. Conflicted, the conscience and the conscientious painter and maker turn elsewhere, as did Rudolph Steiner, founder of the anthroposophy movement, who advocated only natural pigments and binders to be used in buildings. He called blue a lustre colour. Steiner formulated a doctrine about how man can achieve knowledge and awareness of the totality of existence. According to Steiner, the qualities of colour are objective truths as it is to some extent in physics. Each colour has its own distinct frequency. A true blue is non-negotiable. Without the colour of the sea, a bright sky and the tone we perceive the air to be we would be without beginning or continuation, on this earth - the home we call Blue Planet.

Pure pigments then hold a kind of presence, a dignity which stimulates or quiet emotions in buildings. For a house to become a home, it is not only constructed but longed for-shaped by the senses, by living matter, moving light and a sensuous engagement opening and closing doors, windows, walking barefoot across floors, dwelling in the colours of walls and ceilings. A house lives in the movement of its inhabitants. Surfaces suffer kinds of loving stresses by the actions of the dwellers and therefore should be able to age in a transformative way either by an implicit quality and /or through care. Neither plaster or wood can be rigid, but must be supple and responsive to both time and motion. Traditional Japanese houses were built by flexible joints and paper so that the houses would move with the recurring earthquakes, as if they were dancing on top of the Teutonic plates.

A few years later, after I left the room in Kanazawa, I became a guide in a house that the anthroposophists inspired. My father, a member of Malmö Council, had travelled to Venice and felt that the languid, textured sensuality of a waterborne city could be translated to revive a derelict and abandoned industrial harbour in Malmö. My city already had canals, dug by the Dutch in the 18th century - waterways that served both transport and pleasure. To this day, the people of Malmö will row their ways around the canals, drinking and singing in a very un-Swedish way. A frustrated bacchanalian man of a sort and really, a musician, my father dreamed of bringing La Serrenissima' s brocade colours to a grey town crawling out of broken docks of a long gone shipyard industry. Ideas were put forward to the public at the architectural expo Nordform90. Arranged by Malmö City, Form Design Center and Svensk Form, with Thomas Hellquist as chief architect and Annika Heijkenskjöld's, the founder of Form/Design Center and an advocate of design as a political act, led the exhibition. Nordform90 wanted to convey a kind of Nordic value woven from a sense of nature, high technology and care. Architects were invited to design a town house each. Given free hands, there was no holding back listening to building standards or profitability but to construction’s unconstructed dreams.

In the mornings, when starting my tours, I put on my little hat which made me look like a blond circus monkey and took groups of lecherous drunken businessmen from the building industry through the rooms of curving walls undulating with soft corners, and coloured in tones of mineral plaster mustard yellow, Bordeaux red, moss green and finally that blue. Mid-morning, the lords of Swedish construction, representatives of houses constructed by being glued together in mass produced units, turned down their cat calls one notch after another. By the time, they reached the blue room, the men were putty in my hands. They hung at my every word. They too, now, believed in the expression of mineral plaster. To them, the house formed by the anthroposophs was, literally, a breath of fresh air. Lapping up the nourishing, lingering light caressing the walls, there was peace at last. From Malmö to Kanazawa two buildings connected across history, craft and cultures.

A Machiya house is minimal in its truest sense- luscious by its warm and lovingly selected materials- wood a soft skin turning silver by time, straw coloured tatami ageing from bright green to a rich copper gold. And the ultramarine blue, off course, or the moss green in the alcove housing a flower in a ceramic, imperfectly perfect vase. Air moves softly through a space extending or closing by a series of shoji sliding doors. Everything is about presence, where the light, movement, materials and connections create the experience of a spiritual space that, despite its stripped-down interior, embraces the dweller. A wise house, is not simply a question of ecological building, but of educating its inhabitants in the art and craft of building, to bring materials into a balance of textures and colours. The blue mineral wall shifts to a form of communication, just as one colour became my story. Creative craftsmanship is the connection knotting desire, reverie, reflection and stillness together. We, the makers and you who ask to live wisely with living materials, fight for a truth where function and aesthetics make the peaceful samurais of true blue.