Product Description

The Japanese garden, like all gardens, is more than mere nature; it is nature crafted by man. It needs the hands of the designer to give it meaning. The Japanese garden belongs to the realm of architecture; at its best, it is nature as art. The phases of its history document the constant redefinition of man's position within and towards nature. Its changing forms respond both to socio-economic developments and to religious and philosophical trends, and thereby reflect the spiritual climate in which its architecture was conceived. At the same time as detailing the characteristics distinguishing and differentiating each of the five major epochs in the history of the Japanese garden, the author identifies the common motif which underlies them all: the recurrent attempt to unite beauty as natural accident and beauty as human-perfected type, to achieve an aesthetic symbiosis between the seeming randomness of natural form and the strict geometry of the right angle.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #150512 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 239 pages

Review
"This extraordinary book provides a detailed, engrossing history of Japanese gardens with separate chapters for each historical era. It is beautifully illustrated with color photos as well as historical black and white." - Suite 101, New York"

About the Author
Gunter Nitschke was born in Berlin. He acquired degrees in architecture, town planning and classical and modern Japanese. He taught East Asian architecture and urbanism at Princeton University and MIT, later at UCLA and California State Politechnic University at Pomona and at Kyoto Seiko University in Japan. Gunter Nitschke is author of numerous critical essays and books.

Customer Reviews

The author has real thing to say about Japanese Gardens
I have read quit a few 'how-to' books and one or two 'art of' books about Japanese Gardens/Gardening, and this one is simply the best. Chronically ordered, the author summarised the garden style of each period in Japanese history with abstractions, eg:
The Kamakura era -- Rocks in the sand: Gardens of austerity
The Azuchi-Momoyama era -- Path and goal: Gardens of seclusion

Which is really helpful to understand the tendency of the evolution of Japanese gardens. Although there may definitely have some alternation from the theory, and no theory covers every thing, isn't it.

The information contained in book is amazingly rich, eg, it contains about two hundred photos, tens pictures of garden layout (which are very precious), traditional paintings and woodcuts. While I have to say that because of high condensation, the price has to be paid is that some pictures can't not be appreciated fully in such a small size, especially the woodcut, which are normally the ultimate idea of the landscaper, and it has to be a certain size to appreciate the concept of space or emptiness, one of the most important element in oriental art, of the landscape. I reckon the author realised the importance of emptiness, so the top 1/3 page is reserved not for the content, but only for legendary or small pictures or simply leave it as empty.

I highly recommend this book to all the garden lovers, not only Japanese garden lovers, because after reading this book, I suddenly realised that there is such a similarity in the taste of gardens between people from the east and the west. eg in UK, everywhere you can see gardens with shredded lame stones covered with moss both in street side gardens and in the open fields; features of dry garden exist in most front yard of ordinary residency; even 16th town house in York and canal in Cambridge are very much the taste of Japanese.

Japanese Gardens
This book was good, but not brilliant. I had hoped for a book with a great deal more spectacular photos, as a coffee-table book to be looked through for pleasure when a real garden was not accessible. This book has a lot more text and not enough photos. A little disappointing, OK if you are a devotee of the gardening methods involved, and are not simply looking for the pleasure of the beauty of a stunning Japanese garden.

A work of art, alongside the gardens it chronicles.
This is a book of outstanding quality. It ranks among one of my most prized. And I have a few. No, it is not a "coffee table book", but those interested in Japanese gardens are unlikely to buy a coffee-table book.

It is lavishly illustrated, and written with passion, insight and empathy for the Japanese attitude to the natural world and their sense of beauty, and with a knowledge of the history of the tradition of garden creation, and notion of garden as art.

He describes the Japanese reverence for the randomness of nature, alongside their idea of beauty emanating from cultivation of the natural. "These two ways of perceiving beauty - as natural accident and as the perfection of man-made type - are not, to my mind, mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite: it is their simultaneous cultivation and conscious superimposition that best characterizes the traditional Japanese perception of beauty"; two opposites - random and imposed order, complimenting each other, like Chinese principles of Yin and Yang. "Each loses vibrancy if taken separately from the other".

We sense the elevation of garden to sacred space, and its aesthetic role as oasis, bringing an intimation of the natural world beyond.

Japanese gardens are more or less consistent in style, although diverse in form, something that derives from the fact that they capture and reflect the natural environment on which they are based, utilizing three basic elements: rocks, water and plants, to recreate the essence of real landscapes, in a subtle balance between the natural and contrived.

This book offers a comprehensive survey of the history, evolution, influences, cultivation methods, cultural and religious significance and variety of forms. It is a study of a tradition that goes back to the beginning of recorded history.

A stupendous, luscious and informative book, exuding Taschen's usual high quality - at an unbelievably low price. Anyone with an interest in Japanese gardens would find it hard to do better than getting this book.