*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, and this is the second half.
Captive Nature: Arboreal Superficies of an Anthropocentric Landscape (2/2)
The Water Garden is planometric through-and-through, exacted by exquisite plan drawings. While Junya Ishigami + Associates’ elevational catalog of the various types of transplanted trees is quaint and illustrative, it is pseudoscientific as what is really at stake here are the roots’ configurations and the inherent territoriality each tree needs to survive. In plans they are reduced to abstracted signifiers of suspended dots, nonetheless exhibiting a geometrical tour de force that balances botanical and hydrological mastery, a result of the indispensable collaboration with skilled gardeners, arborists and landscapers.
The form of the garden’s landscaping is analogous to the geomorphological phenomenon of chito, a natural landform of interconnected ponds in the marshy grasslands of Japan. Constituting a unique lentic ecosystem, these landscapes can be found in areas such as Oze Marshland and Tateyama-Midagahara Wetlands, both protected under the international Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. However, the categoric difference between chito and this garden is the density of trees and the provenance of the land itself, which has not historically been a marshland.
Perhaps because of its planometric sophistication, the garden is self-referential and contained. It does not yield to a contextual relationship, as previous gardens had with shakkei – a technique of ‘borrowed scenery’ in Japanese gardens that integrated distant natural landmarks or formations as backdrops to the foreground, so expanding the garden space infinitely beyond the limitation of its physical confines. This is why traditional Japanese gardens are understood and experienced as an enriched three-dimensional space even if a garden is small or observation is limited. Seasonal change also plays an important part of the cultural understanding of those spaces. What is remiss here is the passage of time, as in the 100-year plan inculcated in Meiji Shrine’s sacred forest, which projected growth and increasing ecological diversity as a part of the final state of its design.
At the Water Garden, time itself is suspended, the trees capped in girth and height, the circumference of trunks forever delineating the fragility of the overall composition. Here, the moment any one of the trees enlarges, or the view of distant snow-capped mountain infiltrates the serenity of the self-contained interior cosmos, the claims for ‘harmony with space between the trees’ crumble away, together with the logic of ‘the larger the pond is, the wider the space between the branches of the trees, and accordingly the wider the space becomes’. So the branches will have to be incessantly pruned as trees eternally upended in a state of neoteny. Hats off to the dedicated gardeners that will maintain this small pocket of utopia.
The configuration of paths is another manifestation of a deference, even if unintended, the design gives to planarity. The choreography of the progression, or the procession rather, is precisely a matter of control that reframes the purported symbiotic coexistence between human and nature as coming from an anthropocentric perspective. Ironically, neither humans nor nature are allowed to wander freely. The stepping stones are arranged into prescribed paths that unfold into linear sequences – short, medium and long. Some stepping stones are too small and lacking in human affordance, but look nice as a pattern. The result is akin to an emakimono, or Japanese paper scroll, in which a narrative is literally unraveled in progression. And like an emakimono scroll, the scenes in this narrative will be pristine, timeless and miraculously maintained, no matter when you go, as long as human hands have a place in this restless toil. Paradoxically, this also signifies the inherent frailty of the system that will readily overrun the place, not as a marshland but as an indigenous forest at one with its environs.
We can collectively sense an increasing interest in how to achieve symbiosis devoid of human hubris, particularly in the age of the Anthropocene. Ironically, though, if nature is left alone, it can thrive just fine; it is much more resilient than we think it is, much more capable of recuperating according to its own agency. It is where human actions have caused global environmental crises that human interventions are most necessary, and not in terms of nature itself, but in terms of human conduct legitimized by claims of rights and rationalizations. This garden does not claim the hubris that nature can be saved somehow by human hands.
Evading all pretensions and aggrandizing narratives, the Water Garden is a pleasant garden to visit. It is most apt for human consumption and meditation or self-absorption. The productive, sustainable satoyama of nutritional consumption has been thoroughly deposed by the consumption of aesthetics; a fact that has been made all the more potent by the pervasiveness of social media. It is truly of our time. No sooner do we claim to improve nature rather than damaging it, than we realize that this declaration too is a remarkable act of commodification.
Author: Kaz Yoneda
Editor: Hinako Izuhara
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Thank you for your time and kind attention.
Until next time!