TAKESHI HOSAKA'S MICROHOME

CONFIDENCE

Some of what can render us excessively timid professionally is the fear of what might happen to us if things went wrong. We vaguely but powerfully picture the most lurid scenarios resulting from a sacking or bankruptcy: being forced to move to a monstrous housing project on the edge of town, wearing rags, needing to beg… But confidence might return if we could only hold back our panicked thoughts for long enough to explore with greater imagination what could in reality still be possible without much of what we now consider indispensable. We stand to discover that, though a fall in station might not be desirable, it never needs to justify panic. We could live on a salary drastically lower than our current one — and still benefit from sufficient beauty and dignity. A long-standing tradition in Japanese architecture proposes that a simple hut can — when properly thought through — be charming and elegant. When he took stock of his limited resources, Takeshi Hosaka did not despair; using a combination of steel sheeting, concrete and wood, he created aesthetic delight on a plot no larger than a parking space. One can imagine similarly inspiring exercises in thoughtful renunciations around food, clothes or holidays. Our societies surround us with rags-to-riches stories — ostensibly to lend us confidence. But we would benefit far more from well-chosen riches-to-rags stories that showed us successful transitions from prosperity to noble simplicity. The whole thrust of industrialisation has been to democratise access to consumer goods and make it possible to live adequately on little. But the benefits of our herculean material labours have simultaneously been destroyed by unnecessary psychological suggestions that only an upper middle class life will do. We have been scared into conservatism because we are not thinking straight about the consequences of so-called failure. Risks will no longer seem impossible once we properly accept that, contrary to what we are continually told, a graceful life fe might not be dependent on a fortune.

This article is from The School Of Life

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