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"Gardens, Japanese."
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The Japanese garden
An in-depth exploration spanning 800 years of the art, essence, and enduring impact of the Japanese garden. The most comprehensive exploration of the art of the Japanese garden published to date, this book covers more than eight centuries of the history of this important genre. Author and garden designer Sophie Walker brings fresh insight to this subject, exploring the Japanese garden in detail through a series of essays and with 100 featured gardens, ranging from ancient Shinto shrines to imperial gardens and contemporary Zen designs. Leading artists, architects, and other cultural practitioners offer personal perspectives in newly commissioned essays.
Book
Tokyo's Mukōjima-Hyakkaen Garden
Muköjima-Hyakkaen was first established in the early years of the nineteenth century by a wealthy antiques dealer who, with the help of several prominent artists of the period, built a garden where writers could surround themselves with blooming flowers and trees at any time of the year. Soon after stepping inside the walls, the sounds of cars and conversations from the surrounding neighborhood fade and disappear, replaced by the soft chirping of birds, swishing of leaves, and plunking of water droplets falling from the tips of tree branches and tiled roofs onto the soft dirt paths below. Once beyond the traditional thatched bamboo gate, the trail splits and meanders past overhanging trees whose branches twist and end in flowering buds.
Journal Article
Zen landscapes
The essential elements of the dry Japanese garden are few: rocks, gravel, moss. Simultaneously a sensual matrix, a symbolic form and a mythic domain, these gardens exhibit precise craftsmanship and exquisite miniaturization. However, their apparent minimalism belies a profound complexity, which must be approached according to the play of scale, surroundings and seasons, and especially in relation to the other arts, thus allowing us to experience them as living landscapes rather than as merely abstracted design. These gardens partake of the Zen aesthetics of the tea ceremony, which also permeates Japanese poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, cuisine and ceramics, all of which entail different modes of representation. Japanese art favours suggestion and allusion, the indistinct over the literal: the moment when objects emerge or disappear, and the border between figuration and abstraction, are particularly valued. This is an art of the incipient and the potential, inspired by the intimation of continual transformation. This book shows how ceramics – seen as the very sublimation of the earth – plays a crucial role related at once to the site-specificity of gardens, to the ritualized codes of the tea ceremony and to the everyday gestures of the culinary table. Zen Landscapes is the first in-depth study in the West to examine the correspondences between gardens and ceramics, suggesting new implications for theories of representation, arguing for the rightful place of ceramics among the fine arts and above all revealing original ways of seeing. This unique study will appeal to readers interested in landscape design, ceramic appreciation and the customs, craftsmanship and culture of Japan.
eBook
The Seventy Prepositions
Carol Snow's award-winning poetry has been admired and celebrated as \"work of difficult beauty\" (Robert Hass), \"ever restless, ever re-framing the frame of reference\" (Boston Review), teaching us \"how brutally self-transforming a verbal action can be when undertaken in good faith\" (Jorie Graham). In this, her third volume, Snow continues to mine the language to its most mysterious depths and to explore the possibilities its meanings and mechanics hold for definition, transformation, and emotional truth. These poems place us before, and in, language--as we stand before, and in, the world.The Seventy Prepositionscomprises three suites of poems. The first, \"Vocabulary Sentences,\" reflects on words and reality by taking as a formal motif the sort of sentences used to test vocabulary skills in elementary school. The poems of the second suite, \"Vantage,\" gather loosely around questions of perspective and perception. The closing suite finds its inspiration in the Japanese dry-landscape gardens known askaresansui,such as the famous rock garden at Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto. Here the poet approaches composition as one faces a \"miniature Zen garden,\" choosing and positioning words rather than stones, formally, precisely, evocatively.
eBook
Infinite spaces : the art and wisdom of the Japanese garden
\"The Sakuteiki ... by the eleventh-century courtier and poet Tachibana no Toshitsuna laid out the principles that shaped the design of [Japanese] gardens ... Infinite Spaces pairs extracts from the Sakuteiki with inspiring images that beautifully illustrate the principles of this ancient work\"--Jacket.
Book
Mirei Shigemori
The first profound depiction of the great reformer of Japanese garden design in the twentieth century Mirei Shigemori decisively shaped the development of Japanese landscape architecture in the twentieth century. He founded the Kyoto Garden Society in 1932 and published the 26-volume Illustrated Book on the History of the Japanese Garden in 1938. One year later he designed his own first masterwork, the garden of the main hall of Tôfuku-ji Temple. Between then and his death in 1975, he went on to design 240 gardens throughout Japan. Among the most famous are the Tenrai-an tea garden (1969) and the Matsuo Taisha garden (1975). All of his gardens are distinguished by the fact that they honor tradition while at the same time - through their openness to Western modernity - they free themselves from its weight and develop a language of their own. The first part of the book will deal with Shigemori's life and influences, including his interest in ikebana and tea ceremonies. The second part will offer detailed presentations of some seventeen different gardens. Mirei Shigemori prägte maßgeblich die Entwicklung der japanischen Landschaftsarchitektur im 20. Jahrhundert. Seit den 1920er Jahren tätig, gründete er 1932 die Kyotoer Gartengesellschaft und publizierte 1938 das 26-bändige Werk Illustrated Book on the History of the Japanese Garden.Ein Jahr späterentwarf er sein erstes eigenes Meisterwerk, den Garten bei der Haupthalle des Tôfuku-ji Tempels. Von da an gestaltete er 240 Gärten in ganz Japan bis zu seinem Tod 1975; zu den berühmtesten gehören der Teegarten Tenrai-an (1969) und der Matsuo Taisha-Garten (1975). Kennzeichen seiner Gärten ist, dass sie die Tradition ehren und sich zugleich - in der Öffnung gegenüber den Einflüssen der westlichen Moderne - von dem Althergebrachten durch eine eigene Sprache lösen. Der erste Teil des Buches wird sich mit dem Leben Shigemoris und den Einflüssen auf sein Werk auseinandersetzen. Dabei wird auch seine Auseinandersetzung mit Ikebana und Teezeremonien eine Rolle spielen. Der zweite Teil wirdetwa 17 Gärten ausführlich darstellen.
eBook
Spaces in translation : Japanese gardens and the West
One may visit famous gardens in Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka--or one may visit Japanese-styled gardens in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Berlin, London, Paris, Säao Paulo, or Singapore. We often view these gardens as representative of the essence of Japanese culture. Christian Tagsold argues, however, that the idea of the Japanese garden has less do to with Japan's history and traditions, and more to do with its interactions with the West. The first Japanese gardens in the West appeared at the world's fairs in Vienna in 1873 and Philadelphia in 1876 and others soon appeared in museums, garden expositions, the estates of the wealthy, and public parks. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese garden, described as mystical and attuned to nature, had usurped the popularity of the Chinese garden, so prevalent in the eighteenth century. While Japan sponsored the creation of some gardens in a series of acts of cultural diplomacy, the Japanese style was interpreted and promulgated by Europeans and Americans as well. But the fashion for Japanese gardens would decline in inverse relation to the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, their rehabilitation coming in the years following World War II, with the rise of the Zen meditation garden style that has come to dominate the Japanese garden in the West. Tagsold has visited over eighty gardens in ten countries with an eye to questioning how these places signify Japan in non-Japanese geographical and cultural contexts. He ponders their history, the reasons for their popularity, and their connections to geopolitical events, explores their shifting aesthetic, and analyzes those elements which convince visitors that these gardens are \"authentic.\" He concludes that a constant process of cultural translation between Japanese and Western experts and commentators marked these spaces as expressions of otherness, creating an idea of the Orient and its distinction from the West.-- Publisher website.
Book
An empirical research study on prospect–refuge theory and the effect of high-rise buildings in a Japanese garden setting
This study was carried out to test prospect–refuge theory and the effect of external high-rise buildings on landscape preferences in a traditional Japanese daimyo (feudal lords) garden, namely, the Hama-rikyu Gardens located in Tokyo, Japan. Eight sites in the garden were selected to be tested with respect to their degree of openness, their degree of safety, and the ratio of background buildings present. An in situ survey was conducted with 129 people (15–18 per site) who agreed to take part in the survey. Subjects were asked to assess the view at each site in the direction indicated by a sign and to provide responses about (a) their general preference for the view, (b) their perception of the openness of the view, (c) their perception of the safety of the site, (d) their perception of the pleasantness of/disturbance from the background buildings. The results indicated that predefined open-protected sites were more preferred than the others; prospect (perceived openness) was an important indicator of the preferences, whereas the refuge-related symbols (perceived safety) of the garden were not perceived differently between the sites; the ratio of background buildings did not have a significant effect on either landscape preferences or perceived prospect–refuge attributes, whereas the perceived pleasantness of/disturbance from background buildings significantly affected the overall landscape preferences. The results indicated that the design techniques of Japanese daimyo gardens, including the usage of the Shakkei (borrowed scenery) technique, might reveal the principles of prospect–refuge theory. Furthermore, the effect of the surrounding buildings is considered to be a subjective aspect that depends on observers’ experiences and attitudes, rather than an objective one.
Journal Article