Building and Landscape

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Implications of landscape in Zen, Aalto, and Ando Stephen McCann Architectural Theory: Historical Overview Professor Fernando Lara

ZEN AND THE DIALECTIC

INTRODUCTION The goal of this paper is simple and idiotic: Is there an architecture that asks us to stop the endless degradation of our planet? Can we stop clear cutting the rainforest, acidifying our oceans, and justifying our time here as a means to commodity? Is there an architecture that holds us in the necessity of peace? The nature I refer to is not that which is separated from the self, but a self that is integrated with a path of suchness and acceptance.

ZEN AND THE DIALECTIC

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The story of Buddhism does not start with the Dharma Buddha, but with Duhkha, what buddhists refer to as original suffering. This suffering arises from the attachment of the self to the stimuli of which it is presented. To end this suffering, and achieve Nirvana, one must not attempt to destroy the conception of self, but to hold it at a distance in which it can be seen clearly. This distance with which you engage with the self is called the non-self. Through this duality only can the acceptance of the simultaneity arise. Likewise Duhkha, our ‘suffering’ is contingent on the existence of Nirvana, and Nirvana is contingent on Duhkha. They are held together. Nirvana is described as an island in an ocean of fire, of duhkha. Only in full understanding of duhkha and nirvana may we recognize their sameness.

This paper will explore the relationship between dualities and their sameness: the self and the other, the self and the non self, mass and void, and building and landscape.

self: the receiver of the perceptual world other: not another person nor another group of people, but rather the world that we cannot, for the time being, extend the self into. The other is that which is not you (or your perception of you). non-self: that which recognizes the reception of the perceptual world building: the manipulation of the natural world for spatial and environmental control landscape: the natural world that is void of (human) overt control ‘Ma’: a Japanese concept of void in composition The most important component to understanding the relationship of the self to the non self is that of the mediated distance required for its reflection. An understanding of this interstitial distance can inform architectural space and composition. In Zen Buddhism, the Heart Sutra line reads: “form is emptiness, and emptiness is form”. This belies the relationship between the object and void.

BUILDING AND LANDSCAPE

“Body is nothing more than emptiness, emptiness is nothing more than body.

The body is exactly empty, and emptiness is exactly body.

The other four aspects of human existence -feeling, thought, will, and consciousness -are likewise nothing more than emptiness, and emptiness nothing more than they.

All things are empty: Nothing is born, nothing dies, nothing is pure, nothing is stained, nothing increases and nothing decreases...1” 3

Study Model exploring a simultaneity of mass and void. The Author (2021)

ZEN AND THE DIALECTIC

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Rock Garden at Daikakuji Temple.

Kyoto, Japan

“Landscape” by Soami (~1520)

Zen art has always held this in balance in its monasteries, rock gardens, and relationship to its surrounding context. Japanese Zen gardens are famous for their contrived dialogue between objects and the void they sit within2. Possibly the most famous example of Japanese rock gardens is the Daikakuji Temple in Kyoto, where five rock islands sit separately in a field of gravel. Upon initial inspection the garden is a dialogue of mass and earth, boulders springing with weight from the light and airy gravel. The relationship is that of what becomes and that which does not.

Stare longer and it is not the positive that is continuously read, but one feels the latency of the void, or the ability of the void to spontaneously become mass (“form is emptiness, and emptiness is form”). The artist, argued to be Soami (1472-1525) of the Muromachi period, dissolves the binary with the explicit and intentional distinction of the two elements. Through its forthrightness can the two opposing elements be held in simultaneity.

Additional works of Soami, and other Japanese painters, explore the same duality, though with more gradient between the two concepts. Many Zen paintings exist in a world of fog, rain, or some other obfuscation. This can be seen in Saomi’s painting “Landscape”. The artist renders a serene, almost melancholy, autumn night with a full moon. The objects of the painting (the geese, mountains, moon, and landscaped foreground) are held together through the delicate brushwork that forms the water and sky. Is the emptiness of the mist more important than the objects that sit within it? Possibly more enticing is to say that the objects generate their value through the light occupation of the interstitial space, and the viewing distance that enables an understanding of their distinction.

BUILDING AND LANDSCAPE

KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA (1624) The Katsura Imperial Villa is the essential touchpoint of Japanese architectural understanding.

It was built by Prince Toshihito (1579-1629) in the village of Katsura in roughly 16243. The village and site was selected by the Prince for the quality of its moon. It is regarded as a touchpoint for Japanese architecture for the balance of the rigorous grid of the tatami mat floor layout with the surrounding landscaped paths surrounding the site’s large pond. Scattered throughout this pond are bridges and small stone paths meandering the subject into differing visual connections to observe the villa foregrounded by nature. The interior, using a system of sliding panel doors, allows for nature to permeate deeper into the building, though it is always foregrounded by the rigor of the constructed system. This relationship is most clearly seen in the circulation path that hugs the exterior of the building, always presenting the participant with an understanding of building and landscape in dialogue. Here we must stop and ask: Does the binary presented in this way allow for a simultaneity of civilization and nature? As we move through this circulation path, are we encouraged, much like in zen rock gardens, to move past this object elemental distinction to form an understanding about the cycle of becoming and unbecoming?

Plan Diagram of Katsura Imperial Villa. Katsura, Japan

Photograph of built landscape and natural landscape at Katsura Imperial Villa. Location of photo marked with circle in diagram.

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This distinction can most clearly be seen in the photograph, in which the solidity of flat rock underfoot gives way to the sloping pond’s peninsula. It stops orthogonally, with two manicured hedges petering out beside it to frame a view of a sole pine tree sitting proudly on the earth, growing over the pond’s edge. As the binary unfolds, the two systems are presented as the inevitable twins. It is in the character of humanity to exist within the flux of nature.

AALTO

AALTO AND LANDSCAPE

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Alvar Aalto’s work can both be described as reactionary and sovereign. Aalto, amidst the placelessness of modernism, sought a relationship to place, scale, and a connection to the body. He, like in the Katsura Imperial Villa, worked in a dialectic that bridged the gap of perception through contrast. Frampton writes about his ‘tactile sensitivity’ in the material relations of his tectonic forms: brick, wood, and stone. By accentuating the difference in weight in these materials, Aalto places the body where the body is, creating a autonomy in the binary.

“Afterall,natureisasymbolof freedom.Sometimesnature actuallygivesrisetoand maintainstheideaoffreedom.

Ifwebaseourtechnicalplans primarilyonnaturewehave achancetoensurethatthe courseofdevelopmentisonce againinadirectioninwhichour everydayworkandallit’sforms willincreasefreedomrather thandecreaseit.”

Above all, Aalto sought to connect his buildings with the surrounding landscape and context. He is remembered primarily as a Finnish architect that celebrated Finnish landscape and building culture. In material expression and finish it no doubts represents the ‘arriere-garde’ buildings of Northern Europe, though it’s framework is heavily influenced by his exposure to Japanese Architecture. The Villa Mairea (1939) was built shortly after Aalto’s exposure to Tetsuro Yoshida’s Das Japanische Wohnhouse (The Japanese House, 1935)4. Aalto doesn’t re-create a japanese house but instead allows a metaphorical idea of nature to become a framework of design.

His token use of material is there, contrasting a thick textured plaster with projectile and light wood on the facade. The building is abstracted as infill of a forest by placing a regular and gridded ceiling panel in dialogue with arbitrary circular columns. The ceiling to the library stops abrutly to receive an undulating panel that opens sequentially to let in a dappled light ALVARAALTO akin to a canopy. In plan, the L shaped building opens to the public side and creates an idyllic semi-private landscape on the concave side. The pool and humble sauna building here provide a gradient of nature to the forest beyond. Aalto’s conception of nature and building here is dialectic, though in its mutual imposition it becomes more difficult to understand its prompt. Are buildings a natural system? Do we feel closer to nature when we feel like we belong to it?

Further along in his career, Aalto began developing frameworks and diagrams that more closely represented the ideas of differentiation presented in Japanese ‘Ma’. In the Saynatsalo Town Hall (1949)5, Aalto develops a highly organized plan that works in contrast to the metaphorical landscape. Two stairsets lead up to a raised courtyard that both distinctly, and differently handle the surrounding context. The first, a organic staircase bracing the earth, is simply articulated in the earthen language of untreated timber, soil, and grass. The second, more interesting, is a

BUILDING AND LANDSCAPE

hewn granite staircase that ends with a square rock island surrounded by grass. Here we see in form the paradox presented by the Katsura Imperial Villa. The courtyard’s circulation is similar to the Imperial Villa’s by moving it from the interior to the exterior referencing the stark ordered brick volumes with the landscaped courtyard. Though, of course, many courtyard schemes have this sort of circulation pattern, from the other design decisions it seems evident that Aalto is attempting to provoke the binary present in traditional Japanese Architecture.

Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea (1939) clockwise from bottom right: interior photograph of column through library doorway, sauna building curving as landscapes element around pool, plan drawing.

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AALTO

Plan Diagram of Saynatsalo Town Hall (1949). Alvar Aalto, Saynatsalo, Finland.

Raised courtyard revealing interior circulation.

Sod staircase contrasting heavy brick volumes

BUILDING AND LANDSCAPE

CRITICAL REGIONALISM, JAPAN, AND ANDO Kenneth Frampton argues in his essay Towards a Critical Regionalism that successful critical regionalism “has the capacity to cultivate a resistant, identity-giving culture while at the same time having discreet recourse to universal technique” and that it “is as much a bearer of world culture as it is a vehicle of universal civilization”6. Of course it should be remarked that who gets to participate in the goals of universal civilization and bear world culture is controversial. However, landscape is both universal and specific, and the ways in which humans have dealt with it have been generally similar even in geographically isolated populations. We cultivate it, and it cultivates us. It is fixed in our existence and yet it is abstract.

Aalto’s representation of nature grew from the vernacular buildings of his native Scandanavia and his regard for traditional Japanese architecture. Though Aalto never travelled to Japan, he was inspired to collage Japanese techniques into his designs. Is it a fair assumption to emulate the way one culture represents nature and import it to another? Does Japan have a unique set of circumstances that have encouraged a different and inconsistent relationship with nature thanScandanavia? And the most difficult question question to explore (and near impossible for me as an American): Does Japan have a relationship with nature that is covetable and worth emulating?

Scandanavian architecture, like Japanese architecture, expressed highly articulated tectonic construction systems of stone and wood. This tectonic languange lends itself to an understanding of the simultaneity of building and landscape as a tangible cycle of materiality is visible in the system. With the technological advancement of building technologies, natural tectonics have ceded in their use to the material-less clad plastic, metal, and concrete which contribute to Frampton’s concern of ubiquitous placelessness. However it should be explored that architectural ‘Ma’ could instead be elevated with the abstraction of the built, compared to that of the natural world. Additionally, after the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, in which nearly 500,000 wooden structures burned, Japan began heavily building with concrete.

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Japan developed a particular architectural language, and relationship with nature, given its geography’s particularities. As an island nation, Japan always had a constraint of resource depletion, and before modernization Japan couldn’t easily trade across the Sea to gain access to the abundant resources of East Asia (besides for light rare goods like silks, steel, mercury). The Shinto religion, which predates the historical record, evolved under the circumstance of scarcity and stewardship. Shintoism revolves, simply put, around the worship of Japan’s landscape and changing seasons. Japan has already baked into its culture an aspiring balance with the surrounding ecosystem. In addition, Japan has had a long history of natural and man made disturbance in its built work, mainly due to its geographic position on a fault line which contributes to environmental disasters such as frequent earthquakes and their ensuing tsunamis. This has rendered an attitude towards buildings as impermanent things. Japanese buildings, due to natural disasters and the material availability of wood, have a short life span. This informs architectural ‘Ma’ as it solidifies that within a person’s lifespan, they would see numerous events in which buildings become landscape and landscape become buildings.

ANDO

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The concrete superimposition on the tectonics of Katsura Imperial Villa’s frames a different relationship with the surrounding landscape, and arguably more potent in its quality of dialogue. Concrete, an essentially blank material renders itself entirely seperate from the articulation and nuance of the natural world around it. and instead just acts as pure mass. This same quality of contrast is what is so captivating in Tadao Ando’s work.

Tadao Ando is mentioned and celebrated

by Frampton as Japan’s pre-eminent “critical regionalist” for his linguistic distillation of mass and modernism in the traditional spatial vocabulary of Japan7. He works almost exclusively in ‘silky smooth concrete’ for which he has developed a particular construction and vibration method to achieve the blankest concrete possible. His work’s relationshiop to nature is distinct: the building does one thing, and nature does another. The complexity and richness of Ando’s architecture is in the convergence of these systems.

“Such things as light and wind only have Katsura Imperial Villa with concrete. meaning when they are introduced inside a house in a form cut off from the outside world. The isolated fragments of light and air suggest the entire natural world. The forms I have created have altered and acquired meaning through elementary nature (light and air) that give indications of the passage of time and the changing of the seasons…”8 This quote by Tadao Ando argues that the binary must be present in order to recognize the natural world. In the same paradox as the Heart Sutra, Ando presents a manifesto that demands a contrast in perception to recognize their simultaneity, as the forms give meaning to the natural world, and the natural world gives meaning to the form. Ando also argues that indeed he does believe a fragment of light and air ‘suggest the entire world’, or that the our conception of the natural world is a universal understanding that extends past perceptual understanding.

In particular his work at Awaji Yumebatai and the Hundred Step Garden draws a very distinctive line between natural elements and architecture. The project was a landscpae restoration and refurbishment to celebrate the site after a devastating earthquake hit Osaka Bay. In the complex there are one hundred landscaped steps bracing the hillside. It is a system of oversized concrete planters that each are broken down geometrically. Here the exerted cultivated nature is mirrored with an ivy spreading across and cultivating a concrete tower. This is the balance of building and landscape according to Ando.

BUILDING AND LANDSCAPE

Hundred Step Garden at Awaji Yumbutai.

Tadao Ando (1995)

CONCLUSIONS Frederick Steiner summarizes in his paper Landscape ecological urbanism: Origins and trajectories “[as opposed to strict delineation and protection of landscape] landscape urbanists are interested in having people and nature occupy the same space—and to construct new urban ecologies that tap into social, cultural, and environmental dynamics playing off one another.”9 I will not argue the validity of this inquiry at the urban scale, though at the architectural scale a revised aesthectic and theory of landscape should be investigated to promote the perceptual autonomy of both building and landscape. Though convoluted, a path to an intregrated landscape may be in the (false) dichotomy of building and landscape as seperately ‘read’. In the Japanese conception of ‘Ma’, the paradox of simultaneity arises from the object demarcation of a binary.

Aalto and Ando have distinctive ways of handling landscape, though both rely on this paradox to connect their buildings to the surrounding context. Ando promotes a dialectic that embraces the binary of building and landscape, clearly demarcating their intersection. Aalto in his earlier work in Villa Mairea addresses this binary, though approaches it with a gradient of coincidence.

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Tower next to Hundred Step Garden

CONCLUSIONS

building and landscape: akin to Tadao Ando’s work to produce a simultaneity through paradox and Fernando Lara’s prompt: ‘Should we all live in the trees, and never touch the ground?’

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building in landscape: like the Villa Mairea and landscape urbanism, this strategy seeks to allow a coincidence and a direct give and take relationship

building as landscape: a strategy as described by Steiner as ‘urban ecology’ in which there is full coincedence, the design is approached with simultaniety and without distinction

In conclusion, it is difficult to suggest which theory of landscape would promote a covetable and long-lasting respect for landscape and natural processes. Though if we do accept the proposition that ‘Ma’ is a universal phenomenon which applies to our conception of building systems, then a path of integrated landscape may be one that presents both landscape and buildings with a colliding self-sovereignty.

BUILDING AND LANDSCAPE

REFERENCES 1.

Boeree, C. George. “The Heart Sutra.” The Heart Sutra, https://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/heartsutra.html.

2.

Tsang, Henry. “Understanding Japanese Architecture.” YouTube, YouTube, 13 May 2021, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Lh9ZotJQgBM. 3.

“Imperial Villa Katsura by Kobori Enshu at Greatbuildings.” GreatBuildings, http://www.greatbuildings.com/ buildings/imperial_villa_katsura.html.

4.

Sveiven, Megan. “Ad Classics: Villa Mairea / Alvar Aalto.” ArchDaily, ArchDaily, 28 Oct. 2010, https://www.archdaily.com/85390/ad-classics-villa-mairea-alvar-aalto.

5.

Fiederer, Luke. “Ad Classics: Säynätsalo Town Hall / Alvar Aalto.” ArchDaily, ArchDaily, 9 Mar. 2016, https://www. archdaily.com/783392/ad-classics-saynatsalo-town-hall-alvar-aalto.

6.

Frampton, K., 1983. Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance. [Essay] ahameri. com/cv/Courses/CU/Arch%20in%20Theory/Frampton.pdf.

7.

Frampton, Kenneth. “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism.” Perspecta, vol. 20, 1983, p. 147., https://doi. org/10.2307/1567071.

8.

Ando, Tadao, et al. Tadao Ando. A.D.A. Edita, 1995.

9.

Steiner, Frederick. “Landscape Ecological Urbanism: Origins and Trajectories.” Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 100, no. 4, 2011, pp. 333–337., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.01.020.

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