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帰穏庭

KIONTEI

Private Residence Tangshan, China, 2016

A few simple and powerful landscape rocks in the small garden by the central main entrance on the west side of the residence contrast with the richly composed garden of paths, ponds, hills, and waterfalls on the south and east sides of the house.

To balance the strong presence of the Western-style house, Shunmyo Masuno sculpted tall landscape rocks and set them within the Japanese garden. Here, Masuno left the drill marks from the quarrying process on the columnar rock and added a carved circle to show the mark of the hand of man on the natural material.

FROM ITS START AS A COAL MINING TOWN, the city of Tangshan in Hebei Province grew to be one of the largest heavy-industry centers in China. In 1976, a powerful earthquake hit the city, causing great loss of life and catastrophic devastation of the built environment. The post-disaster reconstruction of Tangshan included a complete reorganization of the city. Today, the thriving city has a busy port and reinvigorated industry and is China’s leading producer of steel.

When Shunmyo Masuno visited the property, located in a new residential area surrounded by housing towers rising over twenty stories high, he found the unlikely site for the Japanese-style garden to be challenging. The L-shaped garden abuts a large European-style residence featuring classical elements, including a formal entry with grand columns and a pediment. The original garden included a waterfall that had been designed based on the image of a Japanese-style waterfall, which gave the owner the idea to have the whole garden redesigned using more Japanese elements. When Masuno received the commission, he was not certain how to meld the Japanese aspect of the garden with the formal Western-style architecture, and he worried about the views of the surrounding high-rise buildings.

A nobedan, or stone-paved walkway, leads to a quiet pond filled by a waterfall and surrounded by trees and flowering shrubs. Despite the nearby high-rise buildings, the garden is a calm respite in the city.

At the edge of the stone-paved patio at the east side of the house, a stone scupture by Shunmyo Masuno mediates between the architecture and the landscape and expresses the power and beauty of the stone.

Nevertheless, Masuno agreed to take on the project, and carefully considered how to create a peaceful outdoor space within the challenging parameters of the site. While the client frequently travels to other cities in China for business, he calls Tangshan home and wanted a place where he could relax and slow down the rhythm of his life. Masuno chose the name Kiontei, literally “arrive home calm garden,” based on the Zen expression kikaonza (帰家穏坐), which means to return home and sit calmly. He also chose to design the garden in the chisen kaiyūshiki teien strolling style to take advantage of the large site, provide a connection to the adjacent house belonging to the client’s parents, and create a slow path of movement for the client to enjoy the garden. Two ponds, one large and one small, along with waterfalls and flowing streams create a wide-ranging experience within the garden and varied views throughout.

By mounding the earth, planting tall trees, and constructing a flowing waterfall, Shunmyo Masuno was able to filter the sounds of the city and block the views of the towering buildings adjacent to the garden while creating a serene oasis filled with natural beauty.

Moving from the west side entry toward the southestern corner of the garden, paths faced with stone tiles lead between expanses of gravel and columns of fossilized trees reused from the original garden.

Following the meandering gravel path, a single stone plank forms a bridge over the flowing stream. The reddish color of the stone contrasts and separates the bridge from the gravel while creating a mental connection back to the stones used for the patio on the east side of the residence.

The first hint of the Japanese garden are karesansui-style gravel and rock areas flanking the axial approach to the front door. The imposing west-facing entrance with its tall columns and classical pediment is balanced by the powerful Chinese granite rocks. The simplicity of the karesansui “dry mountain-water” style, using only large blocks of granite and gravel beds, melds well with the architecture, yet is unique and distinctive.

The garden wraps the house on the south and east sides, and there are two primary ways to experience it—sitting quietly and looking out or following the paths through the greenery and alongside the flowing stream. From the interior of the house, stone-paved patios mediate between the rigid geometry of the building and the natural forms of the garden and provide places to sit and view the garden. The east-facing entry hall looks toward a large pond and waterfall, while the family room opens out to the southern patio with its view to a smaller pond. Masuno designed these views to focus on the garden and as much as possible to block out the surrounding tall buildings.

To create a transition between the house and the landscape, the garden incorporates architectural elements such as patios and pergolas adjacent to the residence, while farther from the house the garden emphasizes natural elements like streams and hills.

To achieve this sense of being immersed in the garden without the interruption of the adjacent towers, Masuno built up some areas of the garden, creating “mountains” and planting them with large trees that block the view. By creating these high areas, Masuno also could take advantage of the height to incorporate rock arrangements as waterfalls. The larger waterfall, 2.5 m (8 ft) in height, brings quickly flowing water into the large pond and creates a soothing soundscape within the garden. The client can sit quietly, listen to the water, and view the abundant greenery of the mountain with its stoic rock arrangements and layers of plants, shrubs, and trees.

From the patio adjacent to the house, the sound of the waterfall and the view of the mountain provide a clear visual and aural focus. However, when experiencing the garden from the walking path, the sounds and views are hidden and revealed along the way. Using the water of the flowing streams, waterfalls, and ponds as the primary compositional element of the garden, Masuno designed Kiontei to impart a strong feeling of nature with its changing sights, sounds, and sensations. He thought carefully about how a person moves through the garden, and designed the walking path to provide these diverse experiences of nature.

The surface of the path is varied as well, changing from stepping stones to a continuous surface of random rocks or rectangular stone pavers. At times the path moves alongside a swiftly flowing stream and then suddenly crosses over it with a single large stone slab or a rough stepping stone. At other times the path meanders through the lush greenery, sneaking behind the pond and moving up a raised hill in the southeast corner of the site, where a wooden gazebo constructed in the Táng Dynasty style provides a quiet place to rest and look back over the garden to the house.

The path down from the gazebo on the north side winds behind the mountain with its large waterfall and through the trees along the edge of the site. Where it ends in the northeast corner of the property, the walking path meets a striped stone-paved patio that connects to the parents’ house on one side and, with a few stepping stones, links to a jagged-edged expanse of stone pavers on the other. The stone-paved area creates a patio with a roofed barbeque spot in a corner next to the house, before decreasing in size and moving organically out toward and around the pond. Narrowing further, it becomes a walkway through a grassy area that terraces down toward the entrance hall on the east side of the house.

Interspersed with trees and shrubs, curving walls of rough stone hold back the grassy terraces. Stepping stone paths connect through the terraces to the house and also back to the garden path. In front of the house, just outside the entry hall, a gravel area with large flat stepping stones guides the eyes and feet toward a powerful stone sculpture—a rough stone column atop a large stone slab. Drill marks and cracks from when the stone was quarried remind the viewer of the power of nature while showing the mark of the human hand. Looking out to the garden from the sculpture and the house, the undulating walls give a strong sense of movement and create a powerful yet calming foreground for the extensive and ever-changing garden. With the variety of garden elements and variations in height and views, Masuno met the challenges of the site—fitting with the classical architecture and blocking out the surrounding tall buildings—and also achieved his goal of creating a place for quiet repose.

To mediate between the stone-clad walls of the residence and the east-side patio with views of the lush garden beyond, Shunmyo Masuno designed a monumental stone sculpture. Combining the natural roughness of the rock with markings of the human hand, Masuno chose to express the drill marks from the quarrying process on two corners of the rock.

The east side of the garden as viewed from above looking toward the south shows the layers of space within the garden, as well as the proximity of the high-rise residential towers that Masuno worked carefully to block out from the views within the garden.

Curved rock retaining walls hold back the grass terraces as the garden steps down toward the stone-faced east-side patio. A huge boat-like block of rock juts out from the top of the nearby terrace, expressing a powerful contrast to the gently curving walls.

As a resting place along the path in the garden, a Chinese Táng Dynasty-style gazebo provides shade and framed views of the greenery in the extensive garden.

DESIGN PRINCIPLE

NATURALNESS 自然 shizen

The idea of naturalness, identified by Shinichi Hisamatsu in Zen and Fine Arts (1971) as one of the seven primary characteristics of Zen aesthetics, reflects both the human-made quality of Japanese gardens and nature’s changeability, or utsuroi. Nature is always moving and transforming, and Japanese gardens express this quality through the use of plants and trees that move with the wind and change over the seasons.