Leonard Koren was trained as an architect but never built anything except an eccentric Japanese tea house. Instead he shifted an education in urban planning to a career in art, working across the States, writing in Japan, and creating WET: the Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, one of the premier avant-garde magazines of the 1970s. Koren has produced several books about design and aesthetics (i.e. Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement, Which "Aesthetics" Do You Mean: Ten Definitions), and remains preeminent in the design field for articulating the Japanese theory of wabi-sabi to the Western World.