Temples, Gardens, Space, Light

For the past week or so we have been traveling in Kyoto and Takayama. During our time we have visited many shrines, temples and gardens. The thing we have noticed about the architecture of these places is their consideration of space and scale. Perhaps because of Japan’s large population and small land mass they have been forced to consider space in a way that we don’t in Canada. When something is scarce more value is placed upon it. When we visited a 100-year-old merchant’s home today, the Yoshijima House. The room sizes just felt right, the light filtering through the screens made the rooms peaceful and reflective. You can see how the lines of these traditional buildings influenced modern architecture. Even though they evoke a minimalist aesthetic, there is a softness and esteem for nature in the material chosen, using raw wood left unpainted and uncut in the exposed beams and posts.

 Around most of the temples there are gardens, some of them are Zen gardens composed mostly of stones and gravel.  The names can be a bit obscure and we have struggled to decipher “the young tigers crossing a stream” in the shapes, perhaps more contemplation was needed…. The other gardens have largely centered around ponds and I realized that they have been carefully pruned to create a composition, so that when you look at the garden your eye moves around it like it would a painting or photograph. The lushness of the landscape enables nearly every plant to be bonsai’d and survive, I think if I tried to prune the trees in our yard the way they do here, they would just pack it in.