Gunter NitschkeThinkers

Japanese culture is concerned with finding beauty not just in unusual natural shapes, but also in the delicate proportions of the diaphanous paper screen, the wooden lattices on the facades of traditional town houses and the clear linearity of the modular system of classic Japanese architecture.

Japanese culture is concerned with perceiving and venerating beauty either as a property of natural accident or as the perfection of man-made type.

Japanese culture is marked by a perception of beauty in the simultaneous cultivation and conscious superimposition of manmade perfection and the natural accident whereby the fortuitous order of nature serves to reinforce the rational order imposed by the right angle, and vice versa.

Japanese culture is marked by an obsession with binding, manipulating and even crippling plants for gardens or miniature landscapes has its roots in a cultural phenomenon of marking off property dating back literally thousands of years.

The Japanese garden | teian is home to large, solitary rocks, originally called iwakura and iwasaka, literally meaning "rock seat" and "rock boundary", an etymology that suggests they were placed in preanamistic times as markers, denoting occupation of land or property.

The Japanese garden | teian is nature created by man and thus belongs to the realm of architecture.

The Japanese garden | teian is no representative of opposite extremes of "unnatural" and "natural". One differs from the other simply in the type and degree of their artificiality.