Events

Just Enough should be required reading for anyone who wants to help make today’s world more sustainable.  Read it, please. —Sarah Susanka, author of The Not So Big House You are invited to a presentation, booksigning and reception with Tokyo-based New Orleans native architect Azby Brown featuring his new book JUST ENOUGH: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan. By sharing personal observation and stories that depict vanished ways of life, Just Enough offers insight into what living in a sustainable society is like and how larger concerns can guide daily decisions. The book addresses environmentally related problems that people who lived during the Edo period faced -- from food cultivation to waste systems to the water supply – and how they went about finding solutions. Some two-hundred years ago, the Japanese confronted the same issues that society faces now – energy, water, materials, food and population. The way they found to resolve these issues was to take “just enough” from the world will lead to living meaningful, satisfying lives. “People were educated to be conscious of everything they used, and to place a high value on food, energy, and materials,” says Azby Brown. “The Japanese of the Edo period developed highly integrated systems for food production, material procurement, water supply, and energy provision which were modeled in most cases on natural processes and meshed well with the natural environment.” More than anything else, Just Enough is about a mentality that pervaded traditional Japanese society and which can serve as a blueprint for geener living today. Azby Brown, a native of New Orleans, is the director of the KIT Future Design Institute in Tokyo. He studied architecture and sculpture at Yale College, graduating in 1980, then entered the Department of Architecture of the University of Tokyo in 1985 under a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education. Brown became an associate professor of architectural design at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology in 1995, and currently holds a position there in the department of Media Informatics. He received his master’s degree in 1988 and completed his PhD research in 1995. He is the author of The Genius of Japanese Carpentry, Small Spaces, and The Very Small Home.