The Japanese garden in history

From prototype to type and stereotype

The evolution of religious, artistic and social thinking in Japan ts mirrored in the role assigned to rocks and plants by Japanese garden designers. This rale has changed greatly over the course of history It began as the imitation of the external forms of nature, but as the laws of nature became increas ingly understood, its focus shifted to the imitation of the essence of nature and its internal mode of operation, only to move on. m modern times, to the superimposition of man's egoistic will on nature

Each major epoch in the history of the Japanese garden has approached the garden archetypes described in the preceding pages from the stand point of its own understanding of form and function, with the result that each has given birth to its own new. unique prototype. The development of the formal language of these prototypes was thereby directly related to changing attitudes to nature, to socio-political conditions and to religio-philosophical trends; in short, to the intellectual climate as a whole.

The invention of a new garden prototype and its exploration in various types does not imply a renunciation of the previous prototype; rather, it represents a dynamic remierpretaiion and combination of the old with the new. With historical hindsight it is thus often possible to discover the germ of a later prototype still dormant in a much earlier one At the same time, however, there are inevitable instances of mere mechanical repetition, where gardens simply copy the stereotypes of the past

With reference to Е Ambaszs "Theory of Formal Types". I see the proto type as the product of the gardener as artist, the type as the product of the gardener as craftsman and the stereotype as the product of the gardener as purely commercially-minded designer"