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Foreword

by Richard Neutra, F.A.I.A.

A GENERATION ago, when I accepted my first invitation from Japan to express my ideas on a biological, naturalistic approach to design, upon arriving there I suddenly felt as if I were coming home. And so do I feel now when I read the pages of this book and look at its wonderfully telling pictures of garden art and nature near places for living.

Stronger and livelier becomes my conviction that nature is the great antecedent of all our satisfactions. This has been so for many thousands of years. Man made infinite and subtle adaptations to nature long before his more gross, and often quickly invented and promoted, artificialities began to fill his field of vision. Now the din and jam of a controversial civilization overwhelm all our senses and our nervous being. In this respect, long-insular Japan is a significant, almost tragic illustration of—and certainly also an argument against—our vaunted "progress." As a matter of fact, we do not have progress, but millions of progresses, fast moving and rebounding from each other's fenders. We seem to live in the midst of collisions, and are stuck at the approach to the celebrated "freeway."

Whenever and wherever I have taxed my brain as a planning consultant—be it in various parts of so gloriously "progressive" Africa, in the South Seas, in tropical America south of Panama, or at the foot of old Mount Ararat ("newly shod" by a busy Turkish-American display of civilization designed to impress Soviet border patrols)—the endless theme of my worry has been the combat between the seemingly "practical" that now arrogantly litters and engulfs the scene and what is "biologically bearable." Survival is a matter of "biorealism." Nothing is more practical than to live and wholesomely to survive. We are and will remain in need of nature. But nature pure and simple, untouched nature, is, of course, a lost paradise to man. The people of Tokyo—along with those of Brooklyn, Sao Paulo, Calcutta, Johannesburg-—have all. been expelled from the primeval scene and crowded into a dense jumble of today's shiny novelties and rusty leftovers from yesterday's crop of quick-turnover products.

Japanese Gardens for Today is a memento against shallow and fast change. Leaving aside the matter of ritual symbolism, I have always felt the Japanese garden to be a design in time as well as in space. In it, the eternity of shape is kept before our soul by many laborious but rewarding hours of inconspicuous maintenance. In its volumes and in its space relations a twelfth-century garden looks today just as it did hundreds of years ago, although it is composed, not of mummies and relics, but largely of living plants. This is a time cult; it points to the significance time has to life.

Though in different, contrasting ways to this perpetual "still picture" presented by a Japanese garden, the twin-shrine of Ise, one of the holiest centers of Japan's native religion, demonstrates and dramatizes time. There one of the two identical sanctuaries is always under construction, while the other, being used for worship, casts a side glance at its own mirror-image rejuvenation nearby. And once in every generation the intangible godhead of the shrine is transferred from the old to the new building in solemn ritual. After this the old building is demolished and the rebuilding begun again. It is a ritual demonstration, conscious or unconscious, of the never-ending process of decay and renewal that runs through all eternity.

Built and jointed as it is with wonderful neatness and solidity, there is no "practical" need to tear down the shrine. It is not obsolete. It might well stand for a thousand years. Likewise, there is no practical reason for tending a garden so that through the centuries it will always present, statically, the same compositional ideas. The rationale of what happens both at the Ise Shrine and in the Japanese garden is the same—a symbolic linking of time before the soul of man. Fashion does not penetrate here; an uncanny force of primary design, seeming to embody the stability of nature itself, fends off fatigue, neither tiring man nor boring him.

The universal, balanced ecology of Kruger Park in the Transvaal and American primeval settings, in the midst of which I have been privileged to invest creative effort, are next to eternal, as also are the nature preserves of the Belgian Congo and Brazil; their wonderful lasting balance has an overpowering impressiveness. So too does the Japan garden continue to symbolize these long-range values of equilibrium, even while there flows outside its moon gate a thickening parade of two-toned, chrome-trimmed motor cars of the very latest fashions, blowing ephemeral exhaust fumes.

David H. Engel points in his text to the mystery of how traditional Japanese houses fuse with their gardens, gardens so spontaneously free of the shackles of dry geometricity. The house, on the contrary, could well serve American prefabricators as prototype solutions of the problems of modular construction, as an example of a most humanized standardization accepted by a hundred million people. The three-by-six-foot tatami floor mat governs not only the dimensions of a room, whose size is always some multiple of the mat, but also those of the sliding partitions of the house, the built-in sets of drawers, the movable tansu chests—governs, indeed, every dimension of houses at every level of society, from the huts of poor farmers to the palatial villas of soap manufacturers and princely officials.

The original quality which flows from these ever-cherished building standards harmonizes amazingly well with the relaxed asymmetry of the garden courtyard, and probably needs it for instinctive relief. "Humanized naturalism," as I, like Mr. Engel, would call it, demands this kind of partnership. It becomes more than mere partnership and turns into a true entity, an almost puzzling integration with the site, which is respected as part of the continuous universe—before this universe was marred by commercially developed "subdivisions." It is amazing how all this outwardly related unity can be accomplished even on the most diminished scale, where vistas could never hope to be as expansive as in the Mikado's summer palace. Japanese gardens have made happy the humble, the modest, and the rich.

Mr. Engel agrees with my long-harbored thoughts. All our senses are used in apprehending a designed setting, be it architecture or landscaping. Even the vestibular sense of the inner ear busily records for us our turns, accelerations, and retardations when, following a magical paving pattern, we haltingly walk the irregular windings of a carefully planned, non-repetitious path or tread the willful zigzag of simple planks bridging a lotus pool.

Thus, a visitor to such a jewel of gardening is kept, with brilliant foresight, tenderly activated by the multi-sensorial appeal of the sounds, odors, and colors of nature, the thermal variations of shade, sunlight, and air movements. Happy endocrine discharges and pleasant associations play through the visitor's body and mind as he views, and promenades. Or, even when he sits seemingly in full repose, that strangely emotive "force of form" that exists in the garden keeps eliciting the vital, vibrating functions of the subtle life processes within him that we call delight. All this is far beyond the effects worked on us by merely quaint, exotic decoration.

The author of this valuable book rightly warns against its being used superficially for the shallow imitation of fragments. The book's greatest benefit will be to stir an awakening to the unified appeal that results from such a profoundly integrated composition as a Japanese garden. This same principle of total appeal has also been practiced, often with completely unstudied innocence, from neolithic Machu Picchu in the precipitous mountains of Peru to Zulu villages in the African bush, but it has, alas, all but disappeared where our herds of bulldozers have bullied the landscape into a "marketable" product.

Japanese towns, villages, houses, and gardens are often miracles of land economy, brought about both out of necessity and from a general sense of thrift. This book gives much more than a glimpse of the "humanized naturalism" of the Japanese landscape, a landscape that proves that even a tightly massed civilization need not spell the defilement of the natural scene but, in fact, can mean its glorification.

Los Angeles, February, 1959