KATSURA
REFINED RUSTICITY IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
The Katsura Imperial Villa, near Kyoto, provides an excellent path into an understanding of principles of Japanese design. It is widely regarded as the quintessential embodiment of the culture’s highly refined and understated aesthetic sensibility. The buildings and surrounding grounds radiate a quiet, graceful presence that demonstrates how attuned the Japanese are to the beauty of nature, and how they are able to transform that beauty to their own purposes. Its finely constructed parts reveal the Japanese artisans’ careful attention to detail and sensitive, but calculated, use of natural materials. The complex was built over a fifty-year period by two princes of the Hachijō family, Toshihito (1579–1629) and his son Toshitada (1619–1662), son and grandson of an emperor and advisors to the then current imperial monarch. Toshitada’s marriage into the wealthy and powerful Maeda warrior clan enabled him to continue improving the estate after his father’s death. Katsura consists of a series of interconnected residential buildings in a formal style called shoin (literally “study hall”), originally a chamber designed as a study or lecture hall in a temple or private mansion that by the early seventeenth century had evolved into a formal reception room in a great house (Plates 1-6, 3-16), and several detached tea houses in an informal style known as sukiya (literally “the abode of refinement”), a small, private place for contemplation and participation in the chanoyu tea ceremony (Plates 1-5 a & b). The buildings were all sited within a beautifully manicured Japanese stroll garden. Katsura is the culmination of a style of residential retreat first constructed in the late fourteenth century by samurai rulers and aristocrats (the Kinkakuji Pavilion, Plate 3-31, is a forerunner), and though it was not the last such abode to be erected (another example is the Rikugien Garden, Plate 3-14), it is undoubtedly the finest and the best preserved because of its association with the imperial court.
Plate 1-4 Central gate at the Katsura Imperial Villa, complex completed ca. 1663. Photo: David M. Dunfield, December 2007. The rustic rush and bamboo fence that leads to a humble looking thatched gate was probably once the compound’s main entrance.
Beginning in the 1930s, both Japanese and foreign architects who adopted modernist design principles began to appreciate traditional Japanese residential design. Publications and lectures at that time by Bruno Taut (1880–1938; see page 130) promoted it as the archetype of traditional Japanese residential architectural design. These architects particularly admired the flexibility and compactness of its spaces, the finely crafted details and structural elements made from natural materials, the modular design of building parts, the integral relationships between the buildings’ forms and their structures and between the buildings and surrounding gardens.
It was not until the immediate post-war period, however, that appreciation for Katsura truly took hold, largely through photographs in a seminal English language publication of 1960, jointly authored by architects Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and Tange Kenzō (1913–2005).4 The book features beautiful, and now iconic, black and white photographs taken in 1953 by American-born photographer, Ishimoto Yasuhiro (1921–2012). These images interpreted Katsura in abstract geometric forms fitting the authors’ modernist ideology. Tange famously cropped them to suit his architectural vision.5 Ishimoto first visited Katsura in 1953 when he was accompanying Arthur Drexler (1926–1987), architect and long-time curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on a fact-finding trip to Japan in preparation for a landmark exhibition of Japanese architecture at MoMA in 1955. For that exhibition, Yoshimura Junzō, one of the architects of the International House of Japan, who accompanied Ishimoto and Drexler to Katsura, was commissioned to design a traditional Japanese residential building for MoMA’s courtyard (the building, Shofuso, now resides in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park), funded by John D. Rockefeller, III.
Plate 1-5 a & b Interior and exterior views of the Shokintei Teahouse at the Katsura Imperial Villa, complex completed ca. 1663. Photograph above © amasann/photolibrary.jp. Photograph below © Sam Dcruz/Shutterstock.com. This structure is a classic example of the sukiya shoin architectural style.
Plate 1-6 Moon viewing platform of the old shoin buildings at the Katsura Imperial Villa, complex completed ca. 1663. Photograph © shalion/photolibrary.jp. The moon viewing platform in the foreground extends from the open veranda to join the old shoin to the adjacent garden.
Katsura has continued to attract the interest of younger Japanese architects, and one of the profession’s post-war leaders, Isozaki Arata (b. 1931), a disciple of Tange, has authored two books on the subject. The first, published in Japanese in 1983 and in English translation in 1987, included new color photographs by Ishimoto that presented Katsura in a very different light.6
His more recent publication reassesses previous studies and includes reprints of major essays by Taut, Gropius, Tange, and others.7 He noted that Katsura “does not have a dominant form or style that can be clearly defined in both its architecture and garden, a number of methods are intermingled. Therefore, any discourse on Katsura finally confronts the task of expounding on the significance of the ambiguity created by the mix.”8 Isozaki concluded that Katsura needs to be appreciated “not as a transparently and systematically organized space in the sense of the modernists, but as a contingent, confused, ambiguous, over-layered, and opaque composition [that] induces a gorgeous pleasure in the space. The pleasure goes beyond or perhaps swallows all kinds of discourses. The secret of Katsura’s myth-provoking function exists there.”9
Plate 1-7 View of the veranda of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura (Kanagawa Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan), 1951. Designed by Sakakura Junzō (1901–1969). Sakakura had worked for Le Corbusier in the 1930s. Despite its construction out of the modern materials of stone, concrete, and steel, Sakakura’s admiration for the Katsura Imperial Villa is evident in this building’s deep veranda and slender pillars set into stone supports. This museum building was the first significant public architecture in Japan after World War II.
SHIBUI
SUBTLE ELEGANCE
Shibui, the adjective form of the noun shibusa or shibumi, has the literal meaning of something possessing an astringent taste. Its usage dates back to the Muromachi period. By the seventeenth century, the term had come to describe a distinct sense of beauty, understated and well crafted, exquisite but not overly sweet, the opposite of showiness or gaudiness. The word conveys a sense of elegance and refinement, sophisticated simplicity, tranquility, natural imperfection, and modesty. It is closely associated with the wabi-sabi aesthetics of the Japanese tea ceremony of chanoyu, and is often used interchangeably with the word suki that is used to describe the aesthetic of tea rooms (sukiya).
Katsura figured prominently in the mind of Elizabeth Gordon (1906–2000),