Arts Design Experience at www.japanese-home-gardens.com

BOORA Architects has a long resume of notable cultural arts design experience, most recently the Mesa Arts Center in Mesa, Arizona; the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio and the Mondavi Center for the Arts in Davis, California. However, the firm's pro-bono work on this modest venue for PICA has captured the greatest attention among the national design community. On top of the design award, the temporary theater has won an Honor Award from the NW & Pacific Region Chapter of the AIA;

The idea of a 'conceptual space' is derived from analysis by Boden in relation to creativity in the arts, draws attention to the arts as an alternative means of expression within which this dimension to human experience can be explored. It is important to bear in mind the limitations of the arts insofar as, first, access to such expression is marked by the development of skills and competences that might in some instances become barriers to such articulation and, secondly, so that we do not confuse the aesthetic with the spiritual. The concept of aesthetic experience in relation to art and criticism provides a useful analogy for religious education and spiritual development. We cannot teach in the arts without some sense of the aesthetic.

Dennis Starkings (1993) identifies the possibility of spirituality outside the religious framework in terms of 'some wisdom, some humanity, some integration of our life's experience' which support us in the way that we 'define ourselves and the world we inhabit' (p. 14). The arts, he suggests, provide us with frameworks of meaning or what Margaret Boden (1994) refers to as areas of 'conceptual space' (p. 79), which direct or provide a basis for the organisation of our experience in terms of this process. The arts are concerned with the construction of meaning at a number of levels.