As the eminent American designer George Nelson writes: “This book is all about a once-common sence of fitness in the relationships between hand, material, use, and shape; above all, a sense of delight in the look and feel of very ordinary, humble things.”Clearly this is a book to inspire designers. In capturing the principles of Japanese design, Hideyuki Oka goes beyond packaging to reveal the urge toward visual harmony that has produced the beauties of Japanese architecture, gardening, sculpture, painting—and the unique charm of the throw-away teapot one still buys for a few pennies on a Japanese railway platform.Aesthetically boxed-in by their mass-produced plastic containers, Americans might ask why love is lavished on the wrappings of expendable goods—five eggs, for example. Mr. Nelson writes: “The existence of a designed, man-made thing demands that it be appropriate, a feast for all the senses, beautiful. Because the things men made are really like the things nature made, a complete man could no more tolerate the sight or touch of a wrongly made thing than could nature.”Japan’s traditional packaging is illustrated here in astonishing variety, and no less varied are the designs, which range from the delicate and graceful to the rustic and bold but are always functional. Remarkable are the ingenious ways in which these packages solve specific problems of design without sacrificing beauty to necessity.Finally the reader is left to ponder a question that comes to mind throughout the book. As the author expresses it: “If the craftsmen and ‘designers’ of old Japan could create beauty with their materials, are we today to accept defeat when faced with ours?”

    A basic outline of how to decorate a room opens this photographic dictionary

    

    Includes the work of John Buckland Wright, Raymond Loewy Associates, Paul Klee, Joseph Binder, and hundreds of others. Preface. Bibliography. 699 trademarks.

    

    Fluid mechanics, constant density inviscid flow, singular perturbation problems, viscosity, thin-wing and slender body theories, drag minimalization, and other essentials are addressed in a lively, literate manner and accompanied by diagrams.