Japanese gardens (日本庭園, nihon teien) are traditional gardens whose designs are accompanied by Japanese aesthetics and philosophical ideas, avoid artificial ornamentation, and highlight the natural landscape. Plants and worn, aged materials are generally used by Japanese garden designers to suggest an ancient and faraway natural landscape, and to express the fragility of existence as well as time's unstoppable advance.
-Wikipedia
Site
Carnation, Washington
DATE
Spring 2021
PROJECT PHASE
Landscape Architecture
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We’ll be working closely in the next few weeks and months to collaborate on the vision for the Maxon House plan to craft outdoor environments and experiences inspired by the core principles of Japanese garden landscape design. The landscape plan will incorporate and integrate seamlessly with the addition of the Maxon railroad which is an existing element embedded into the forest landscape. The architecture rests at the intersection of the ecotone, the area connecting the Pacific Northwest forest and the meadow and valley farms beyond and below.
“Japanese gardens have their roots in the national religion of Shinto, with its story of the creation of eight perfect islands, and of the shinchi, the lakes of the gods. Prehistoric Shinto shrines to the kami, the gods and spirits, are found on beaches and in forests all over the island. They often took the form of unusual rocks or trees marked with cords of rice fiber (shimenawa) and surrounded with white stones or pebbles, a symbol of purity. The white gravel courtyard became a distinctive feature of Shinto shrines, Imperial Palaces, Buddhist temples, and Zen gardens. Although its original meaning is somewhat obscure, one of the Japanese words for garden—niwa—came to mean a place that had been cleansed and purified in anticipation of the arrival of kami, the deified spirits of Shinto, and the Shinto reverence for great rocks, lakes, ancient trees, and other "dignitaries of nature" would exert an enduring influence on Japanese garden design.”
-Wikipedia
“The early Japanese gardens largely followed the Chinese model, but gradually Japanese gardens developed their own principles and aesthetics. These were spelled out by a series of landscape gardening manuals, beginning with Sakuteiki ("Records of Garden Making") in the Heian Period (794–1185). The principles of sacred gardens, such as the gardens of Zen Buddhist temples, were different from those of pleasure or promenade gardens; for example, Zen Buddhist gardens were designed to be seen, while seated, from a platform with a view of the whole garden, without entering it, while promenade gardens were meant to be seen by walking through the garden and stopping at a series of view points. However, they often contain common elements and used the same techniques. Below are some photos from our travels to Japan to experience the garden landscapes firsthand in Kyoto and beyond.
Borrowing scenery, as a technique of design was conceptualized in modernist architectural theory in the 1960s. This understanding was made explicit among Japanese architects, for whom it was the utmost effort to design continuity of interior and exterior space, a major topic in modernist architecture. Architects from the International Style in modern architecture acclaimed things like simplicity and space in Japanese architecture. Seen from the perspective of architecture theory borrowing scenery was seen as a fixed three-dimensional plasticity, whence shakkei is usually translated as "borrowed" scenery.” -Wikipedia
Tom Kundig talks about the concept of the shakkei or the borrowed landscape on the Time Sensitive podcast with host Spencer Bailey:
Interviewer: “Shakkei is a Japanese garden landscape idea of layering. So, you’re looking out the window, and the landscape becomes a part of the interior. You might have the rock garden, and then, beyond it, you might have some trees or some plants, and then, beyond that, there could be Mount Fuji.”
Tom: “It’s another way of saying “borrowed landscape… I haven’t heard that term, but, man, I like that a lot because I think that’s so true: It breathes in and it breathes out. I’m going to go back to an earlier comment you made about the scale and size of some of these buildings. In order to have that kind of experience, and a true holistic experience of that inside, outside, beyond, the backend—the P.U.P.—you’ve got to have a relatively small building because if the buildings are too small or too fat, you all of a sudden have lost that connection, potential connection, to that landscape. Even in the larger projects that I work on, you’ll see that they’re relatively thin in a sense, so you can get both almost behind the head and in front of the head experience of the landscape.”
Japanese garden landscape principles:
Miniaturization. The Japanese garden is a miniature and idealized view of nature. Rocks can represent mountains, and ponds can represent seas. The garden is sometimes made to appear larger by placing larger rocks and trees in the foreground, and smaller ones in the background.
Concealment (miegakure, "hide and reveal"). The Zen Buddhist garden is meant to be seen all at once, but the promenade garden is meant to be seen one landscape at a time, like a scroll of painted landscapes unrolling. Features are hidden behind hills, trees groves or bamboo, walls or structures, to be discovered when the visitor follows the winding path.
Borrowed scenery (shakkei). Smaller gardens are often designed to incorporate borrowed scenery, the view of features outside the garden such as hills, trees or temples, as part of the view. This makes the garden seem larger than it really is.
Asymmetry. Japanese gardens are not laid on straight axes, or with a single feature dominating the view. Buildings and garden features are usually placed to be seen from a diagonal, and are carefully composed into scenes that contrast right angles, such as buildings with natural features, and vertical features, such as rocks, bamboo or trees, with horizontal features, such as water.
