A large audience all over the world is fascinated and intrigued by the images of Japanese gardens and the beauty they perceive in them. Since few Westerners have had an opportunity to view Japanese gardens in their general cultural and specific architectural context, I’d like to explore this attraction in more detail, and reflect upon the characteristics that seem to point to the more universal message that the Japanese garden in its many forms holds for audiences the world over.
My perspective is based on an occidental, northern European tradition of architecture and aesthetics. A tradition that to this very date has defined landscape art and architecture in relation to the architecture that it accompanies, from the villa gardens of Italy, to the large formal gardens of palace architecture in France and Germany, to the city parks found in modern urban environments and most recent expressions of corporate architecture found throughout the world with their surrounding landscape installations.
In the West the relationship between landscape and architecture is one of subservience. The landscape or garden serves as a decorative element, often based on formal, architectural elements, an adjunct to the demands of traffic flow and the functional requirements of the public or private space it inhabits. While this is a somewhat sweeping generalization, I believe that at the core it describes most of what we know as public or private gardens, from our own everyday experience. It is in most ways still an outward perspective, from the outside the garden or landscape ‘decorates’ the specific buildings that we approach.
In contrast the Japanese garden finds its main roots in an aesthetic that gives the garden an intrinsic value of its own, as a means of representing the natural world in an idealized state for contemplation, as a way of expressing the relationship that humans have to the natural world and its elements. Perhaps what most fascinates the Western viewer when first seeing photos of Japanese gardens, is that they seem to be paintings, using natural materials in three dimensional space.
The composition as a whole has a higher intrinsic value than its elements, whereas in the West this relationship is often inverse. In the Japanese garden the architecture forms the frame for the changing views of a garden, whereas in the West the garden forms the frame and decorates the architecture.
The relationship between garden and buildings is most often closer, as the interior and exterior spaces meld together due to the large openings provided in the architecture, created by removable Shoji screens that open an entire wall of the building to the viewing of the garden. The spatial relationship is one of viewing from a slightly elevated platform, downward and upward. And while smaller Japanese gardens are almost always delimited by a wall that frames the three dimensional space, larger installations often include the surrounding landscape as a backdrop for the entire composition, consciously removing the visual boundary between garden and landscape, thereby extending the space to generate a sense of continuity.
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