Japanese Gardens for today. David Engel

      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

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