*Disclaimer: This piece was originally published in the February 2021 issue of The Architectural Review on the theme of gardens. Originally under the altered title of “Arboreal Artifice”, it was not published in Japanese, and we would like to take this opportunity to release it in the bilingual format of the Bureau newsletter for our global readers. As it was a long piece, we have divided this into two installments. This month is its first half.
Captive Nature: Arboreal Superficies of an Anthropocentric Landscape (1/2)
The painstaking transplantation of 318 trees is human intervention par excellence: innocent trees transfigured into living sculptures suspended in time by the whim of human hands. All this effort is driven by the intent to return nature to some state of equilibrium by way of human wisdom, to symbolize the relationship between man and nature. Understood as artifice, the garden is a canvas, and human hands the masters of molding it to their own subjective ideal.
This uncanny garden was designed by Junya Ishigami + Associates and completed in June 2018, the pamphlet claiming to provide ‘a place of philosophical thinking that reflects the inner self of visitors’. The many trees were transplanted from adjacent property, originally a heavily wooded satoyama (an area between foothills and arable flat land) which was going to be developed into premium villas and a new restaurant. Art Biotop owns and operates this self-professed ‘culture resort’ an hour by bullet train north-east of Tokyo and a shuttle ride from Nasushiobara, Tochigi Prefecture – an area favored by royalty and the rich alike as a summer retreat. It is a sprawling complex composed of a café restaurant, gallery, extended-stay residences, and glass and pottery studios. The Water Garden was commissioned as part of the complex and is accessible only to patrons of this establishment.
On arrival, I was greeted by ground covered in half-melted snow, impregnated by leafless trees in hibernation. Ponds ripple with the trickling of crystalline water from a nearby stream, accentuating the fallen foliage accumulating at the bottom of the ponds, decomposing to become nutrients in their inevitable denaturing. While the best season to experience the garden is spring or autumn, winter offers a sublime desolation that allows you to stroll in solitude, crisp air and stinging cold sharpening the senses.
Ostensibly seductive in its organic geometrical complexity and well-manicured scenery, simultaneously fragile and perplexing, the garden is a microcosm of metaphors, similes and equivocal narratives in symphony to render wanderers lost in their own thoughts, the effect less cerebral but emotive. The lattices of the tree canopy, unveiled in winter, manifest the natural organicity of bifurcating branches and overlapping silhouettes. It is when the gaze turns to trunks and roots that you begin to sense something unnatural, self-evidently artificial. To uproot the trees without damaging them, specialized machines – of which only two exist in Japan – were deployed to move at a pace of four trees per day. There is an order, an apparent rule and system in which trees were transplanted, not in the straightforward grid of a forestry farm, but in which there is a relationship between the sinuous geometries of islands and the centrality of trees planted on them.
Japan has a rich history of gardens in various forms, based on diverse philosophical intentions, and engrained in the everyday lives of residents. From the perambulating pleasure-palace of the Katsura Imperial Villa to the fabled pantheon of meditative Zen karesansui rock gardens, contemporary Japanese landscape design has a formidable array of precedents to contend with. While the intention was to incubate a new garden, the Water Garden is very much in line with the spirit of these gardens, in both formation and maintenance. Aesthetic and picturesque, traditional Japanese gardens are ultimately a highly idealized ecological trope in which humanity and nature can be in a symbiotic coexistence as long as one does not supersede the other.
The traces of a landscape archaeology have been positioned in a one-to-one relationship to the garden’s constituent elements: the ponds are reminiscent of rice paddies; mosses covering the islands evoke pastures; and trees recall bygone satoyama scenery, a tradition that has existed since ancient times in Japan. The term defines a practice that encompasses not only a range of agrarian productive landscapes, but also romanticist bucolic scenery. On a pragmatic level, these socio-ecological productive fields that cover land and extend into sea with fisheries result in a diverse patchwork of land uses and sustainable ecosystems engendered by interactions between humans and nature. These interactions attain productivity, symbiosis and meaning over long periods of time through consistent and meticulous labor, bringing both paddy fields and pasture meadows well within the category of the satoyama process and philosophy. While the Water Garden draws on these references, it is singularly aesthetic in purpose, departing from the productive memory of the bespoke landscape.
Author: Kaz Yoneda
Editor: Hinako Izuhara
Associate: Tomoka Kurosawa
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Until next time!