The view of Mount Fuji that Hokusai (1760-1849) represented from the town of Kajikasawa could summarize this dual gaze of Japanese people towards nature, in which love preached by Japanese philosopher Daisetzu Suzuki (1870-1966) would only reflect one dimension. With this intention, the artist creates a sense of depth through the use of two triangles separated by a fog that intercede between both of them, a resource that allows the abstraction of a landscape in which the fisherman must develop his work. Hokusai also achieve to express the relationship between man and elements in a very concisely way. The latter show simultaneously both his beautiful conformation (such as Fujisan, which Japanese often compared to an inverted fan, or the serene coding of the calm sky behind it), and the dangers that are capable of causing, whose fractal geometry encourages them to escape the human control.
The idealization is the resource that the Japanese people implements to 'train' this environment, with the aim to reduce it and, ultimately, appreciate it sincerely. This tool is what gives a mediator character to Japanese garden, as a case of close relationship between architecture and the surrounding landscape.
RITO, AKISATO (1799). Engraving of Ryoanji in the Illustrated Guide of gardens in Kyoto. (Miyako rinsen meisho zue). © Yoshinoya Tamehachi.
The wall surrounding the plane garden of Ryoanji Temple (h. S. XV) in Kyoto provides a framework for its large rocks scattered in an area of raked gravel, as if they were islands emerging from the sea. This wall mediates between the delimited area for the artwork and the outside world, allowing the creation of a place for contemplation.
Also Japanese architect Tadao Ando (*1941) finds prolonged, uninterrupted walls very serene, especially when confronted with the undulating environment. It has come to demonstrate that the more severe is the wall, the greater is its power of communication. If sometimes it can become a sharp weapon that threatens us, other times it is a mirror in which the landscape and the sunlight are subtly reflected.
ANDO, TADAO (2008-10). Lee Ufan Museum. Naoshima (Japan). Site plan. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates.
ANDO, TADAO (2008-10). Lee Ufan Museum. Naoshima (Japan). Axonometry. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates.
His Lee Ufan Museum (2008-10) is the first dedicated exclusively to this recognized Korean artist (*1936). It is located in a ravine surrounded by hills on the island of Naoshima (Japan), with the sea as backdrop. Ufan's works are already presented in an outdoor plaza in front of the entrance; they continue in a triangular patio surrounded by walls (which functions as a prelude) and in the interior of the museum, formed by three parallelepipeds with different scales, textures and lighting, arranged to look like they are carelessly buried in the valley.
Visitors have to follow the long wall that accompanies the approach path, generating a characteristic lonely elevation, to be introduced in the field through the yard, wholes walls trimmed eloquently the sky in a triangle.
As an important benchmark of Ryoanji, it is a quiet space where landscape, architecture and art get together, providing another place for quiet and concentrated contemplation. Ando reaffirms the idea of a 'architecturalized' landscape that seeks unity of the building with the shape of the natural terrain (a formula that was previously tested in other constructions of the island) and ends by melting it with the environment.
In contrast, Japanese architect Toyo Ito (*1941) aims to design a building that is experienced as a landscaped garden of kaiyu type. As in the garden of the Katsura Palace in Kyoto (S. XVII), the general organizational structure of this one is often the various miniature landscapes gathered around a central pond, according to a predetermined circuit. Today, Ito looks for a space originated as the total sum of the sequences experienced by a person walking through it, so that the space really depends on the route taken by the user.
DINASTÍA HACHIJO (S. XVII). Katsura Imperial Villa. Aerial view and general section of the site.
The imagery used to complete this spatial conception comes from its interpretation of the traditional curtain type Maku, whose deployment is a typically Japanese concept. This allows the creation of a place in which for a short period of time the landscape, once removed, would recover its original condition.
HIROSHIGE, UTAGAWA (1832-34). Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido's route. 47th Station Seki. Early departure from the inn to daymios. Color woodcut.
With this idea in 2004 Toyo Ito conceived the flagship of a brand of Italian shoes and leather Tod's in Omotesando Avenue in Tokyo. As the plot was set back as an "L" form, the façade of this trade street was very narrow. The alternative to the problem led to the creation of a unified volume, provided by a continuous façade with a dual character. The outer surface is seen as a structural curtain 30 cm thick that is a graphic pattern concrete trees at the same time. This system supports floor slabs on its perimeter, which thus extend ten to fifteen meters without internal supports.
The structure and graphic pattern join forces to give this work a new notion of surface and a new type of abstraction which, again, takes advantage of fractal geometry.
ITO, TOYO (2004). Tod's building. Tokyo (Japan). Conceptual scale model. © Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects.
In Japan, the architecture and the environment require a mandatory collaboration to relieve the unlimited growth and the congestion in cities. For Ando and Ito, the structure becomes a means to raise the strategy of this cooperation in the reduced available surface of the Japanese archipelago, and it is expressed by two very different structural logics. The figuration that propose their façades is materialized in two patterns emerged from the interaction between material elements and opposite poles, although complementary, of the elected organization systems.
ANDO, TADAO (2008-10). Lee Ufan Museum. Naoshima (Japan). Elevation. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates.
ITO, TOYO (2004). Tod's building. Tokyo (Japan). Façade unfolded. © Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects.
NOTES.-
(1) KALLAND, ARNE (1995). Asian Perceptions of Nature: a critical approach. Londres: Curzon Press, p. 246.
(2) ANDO, TADAO y FRAMPTON, KENNETH (1984). Tadao Ando: Buildings, Projects, and Writings. Nueva York: Rizzoli (versión castellana de Santiago Castán (1985). Tadao Ando: Edificios, Proyectos, Escritos. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili), p. 24.
(3) ITO, TOYO (2000). Escritos. Murcia: Colegio Oficial de Aparejadores y Arquitectos Técnicos de Murcia, p. 143.
