The name of this teahouse, Sunkaraku, or "Evanescent Joys," reflects the spirit of the traditional Japanese tea ceremony as a temporary refuge from the complexities of daily life. The architecture reveals a special delight in natural materials: cedar thatch for the roof, nandina and red pine with the bark intact for the pillars, bamboo stalks for the ceiling and rainspouts, and earth-colored plaster for the walls. The Museum acquired Sunkaraku from Ōgi Rodō, the architect who constructed it using elements from an eighteenth-century teahouse. We know from diaries kept by one of the participants in the tea ceremonies held at Sunkaraku that the guests included leaders of the financial and political world of early twentieth-century Japan, for whom Ōgi Rodō designed country retreats and teahouses. The Sunkaraku teahouse is the only one of Rodō's works outside Japan, where just three of his buildings remain extant. Felice Fischer, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 48.