In my first year in Japan I was working on a urban housing project. In the first meeting we shared our thoughts and ideas. While I was starting with the urban plot, thinking about the bigger scale, different flows and social context, my Japanese architects colleagues started from a different perspective. They had made a small wooden detail of a framework of lattices with with a certain pattern providing both privacy and openess at the same time. This was for them the start of this urban project; how a person would experience the transition from outside to inside and the other way around.

This approach of thinking about the intermediary space as a starting point intrigued me. It lies at the core of the Japanese thinking about architecture, art and crafts. In Japanese they call this 間 ‘Ma’ The space between. The character for Ma (間) combines the characters of “gate” and “sun” - it evokes the sunlight traveling through a door - it is about stillness, a pauze, the space between filled with energy and possibilities.