The Japan Garden 4: Site C5
The site identifier C5 says nothing of landscape, topography or the potential of the site. I knew what to expect from the contour map but, when I saw the site I found it difficult to imagine a Japanese garden there because I couldn’t imagine a palace or temple or even a house of a high-ranking official or samurai there.
The site’s area is about 2,500 sq.m and the expo guidelines suggested filling it to the +10.00m contour line to create approximately 500 sq.m, of level land and to then building a pavilion of no more than 250m2 – as long as the height of its eaves was no more than 7m. This surely meant measuring from the top of the fill and not the reference level of the access road because otherwise there’d be a three-meter high building on four meters of fill. The image at right below models those parameters. The same guidelines also discouraged walls or any kind of physical barrier between the road and the pavilion/garden. This was obviously a contradiction but I didn’t expect to be thanked for flagging it. The task was to see what could be done.
My first thought was to have an inclined dam-like structure create a pond in which the pavilions stood, but oblique references to maintenance and safety issues in two consecutive meetings felt ominous. The tea leaves were telling me to lose the pond. There isn’t any surface water apart from a small area noted on the contour map as a lake (池) at the front of the site but its position varies. After rain, the lowest portion of the site is 50cm of clay mud. In this next image, the pond had shrunk to about 10cm deep and was on the left side only. The grassed roadside verge slopes up to reduce the apparent height of the wall and make the stairs seem less contrived. Even so, it is only possible to get stairs up to +9.0m level but by having the wall go around the stairs. That wall is still continuous but beginning to morph into two stone “islands” for the pine trees. Even so, it still wasn’t the required barrier-free access to the pavilion.
Meanwhile, the required area of post-expo commercial area kept increasing, first to 300m2 and then to 400–450m2. Accommodating this on 500m2 of level land suggested a two-storey building and so the under-floor storage area eventually became a full basement for what I imagined would be kitchens and secondary spaces such as toilets, as well as elevator access. I created another split in the rock wall so there was now a direct link between road and basement but this version existed only for only about ten minutes before a faceslap moment when I realized it was stupid to fill the site only to dig a basement. It was far more sane to create 500 sq.m of flat land by excavating down to the +6.0 level as far as the +9.0m contour. The image bottom left below is the first image of this new arrangement and the one on the right is how the pavilion looked between early April and late August. The former rock wall has morphed into rock retaining walls and “islands” containing the pine trees and there’s now about 350 sq.m of pavilion area with barrier-free access.
The section at left below shows this new relationship between building and land. Separating the building from the retaining walls allows for discreet service entrances at each end of the building, for easier construction, and for less likelihood of water penetration. Above, there is the appearance of the usual relationship between the external engawa corridor and the garden and there can even be a steppingstone linking them. All good but meanwhile, there was worrying talk 4.5 meters being the ideal height for commercial space. A two-storey building wasn’t going to happen if the maximum eaves height was 7 metres. The proportions of the upper rooms level were already beginning to feel less like a pavilion and more like a temple, particularly above the doors that were already oversized at 2.2m. I kept quiet.
Post-expo commercial considerations continued to weigh. If there was a likelihood of the space being used for a restaurant for example, it would be good for it to have good views and the lower level was lacking in these. I heard (only once, admittedly) that a high-end Japanese restaurant operator was maybe interested and immediately thought teppan-yaki might work if a dumb-waiter were installed. But, whatever happened to the actual pavilion spaces after the conclusion of the expo, access to the garden through the buildings couldn’t be assumed. The idea of splitting the pavilion into two was present from the beginning but for mainly compositional reasons as splitting the pavilion made the buildings seem less of a barrier so close to the road. I liked to think the gap between the two buildings allowed glimpses of the garden at the rear and, once a certain distance in, of the stairs to access it. These stairs branched at a landing, separating garden access and pavilion access. Two more stairs at the front of the site provided dedicated access to the garden. I couldn’t think of a better way to do it.
There were no major changes between April and August. I went to Tokyo for a week but, almost immediately after arriving, had a message that there was a problem. Excavation had uncovered rock – rock faces – at both ends of the site and could I come to the site soon after I returned? This was going to mean a major design change because I’d designed the pavilions to fit the excavations so tightly, and that there was no leeway to reposition them. Red flag.
August 7, I arrive at the site with three possible solutions but the overall mood was already in favour of getting rid of the west pavilion so that the front, east one could shift a couple of meters westwards. The requirement for at least 300 sq.m of building suddenly wasn’t so important. In the ensuing over-attended meeting in an already hot room, I said I didn’t like the idea of a single building but, with the help of a cool-headed and consensus-forming project manager (🙏) and the following image of Katsura Palace I’d brought with me (🍀) , we all agreed to not do anything “drastic” and instead:
- Remove the west pavilion to make some space
- Move the east pavilion westwards and away from the rock face
- Lengthen the east pavilion to recover some area
- Add a small annex to the west side of the east pavilion.
This last one, No. 4, was arrived at after I invoked this next image of the Musical Instrument Room at Katsura Palace, the unassailable reference. It’s a beautiful way to turn a corner connecting the Old Shoin (“retreat” or “study”, on the right) to the New Palace (on the left) but it’s also a beautiful way to end a building.
This new annex to the Japan Ishinomaki Garden pavilion turned out to be more than a vestige of what was to have been. It’s now a distinct physical and a symbolic entrance that makes garden access more direct and obvious. It makes the garden seem more important as a thing to go and see. There’s a better balance between pavilion and garden and more of a sense they exist as parts of a single composition – as should be with a Japanese garden. The unearthing of the rock faces was a good thing.
Finally, this next drone-photo collage was the first look of the reworked pavilion and garden in context. It’s fairly accurate as I used the positions of the pagoda and two existing trees at the front of the site to triangulate and align the render with the image. The only unknown is how much of the very Chinese pagoda currently being built on the mountain will be visible through the trees from below. I have a feeling only the tip will be visible but can’t be sure as nearby trees may be cleared to allow a better view. I’ve modeled the pagoda red but the finished one may well be blue or some other color. Whatever happens, it’s more borrowed scenery than I anticipated, but there’s no need to pretend this Japanese garden isn’t in China. I’m currently trying to contrive the landscape to set up view corridors and other views that frame even partial views of the pagoda and make it into a feature. Japan increasingly isolated itself from China and the rest of the world soon after some messiness at the end of the Tang Dynasty (907CE) but garden principles such as borrowed scenery had already been adopted and, like many other aspects of Japanese culture, were to develop separately over the next 1,000 years give or take.
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Revisited this week:
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