The University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center will host Azby Brown and his talk "Mottainai: Sustainability in Contemporary Japan" on March 17.
The “mottainai” environmental resource and design principles of Edo-period Japan were so effective that they canserve as prototype and inspiration for truly sustainable living, teaching us the many benefits of living in a highly-developed circular economy. This talk shows how Edo-period Japanese lived and how they made optimum use oftheir limited resources.It starts at 7:00 pm EST and is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Azby Brown is a native of New Orleans, and has lived in Japan since 1985. A widely published author and authority on Japanesearchitecture, design, and environment, his groundbreaking writings on traditional Japanese carpentry, compact housing, and traditional sustainable practices of Japan are recognized as having brought these fields to the awareness of Western designers and the general public. In addition to The Genius of Japanese Carpentry, he has written Small Spaces (1993), The Japanese Dream House (2001), The Very Small Home (2005), and Just Enough: Lessons in living green from traditional Japan (2010). He retired in 2017 from the Kanazawa Institute of Technology,where he founded the Future Design Institute, and is currently on the sculpture faculty of Musashino Art University in Tokyo.
This program is brought to you by the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh and made possible with the generous support of the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership