Project Scope and Intent
The Passage is a collaboration among owners, landscape architect, architect, and artists – a very personal garden experience that explores movement in time, space, and spirit. Practicing Buddhists, the two owners possess a profound, spiritual connection to the natural landscape. Their garden appeals as much to the senses as it does to the mind. The owner likens the experience of the garden to her professional work as a psychotherapist– a journey through the unknown where there is constant discovery and new-found understanding. The new garden accommodates the everyday functions of family life (gathering, dining, bathing), while nurturing delight, surprise, and contemplation.
The project is a private garden located on 10-acre site in New England. The existing house was built by the owners over 20 years ago on a hillside of undeveloped woodland. The dramatic effects of glaciation are found everywhere – huge boulders brought from far away emerge from the earth, while the rolling hilltops and valleys reflect the scouring of the receding ice flows. The house overlooks a vast kettlehole over 30’ deep.
Architectural renovations include an expanded main house, the conversion of a private temple to a guest house, and a “bridge” to a new bedroom wing and main entry. The new landscape draws inspiration from the ancient Japanese tea garden. Called “roji”, or “passageway”, the tea garden was designed not to be viewed from a single location, but as a series of experiences along a path leading to the tea ceremony. Landscape spaces include a parking court and entry garden, a stream garden, courtyard garden, perennial borders, woodland path, and meditation circle. Garden elements include a koi pond, Ofuro (soaking tub), Tokonoma (ceremonial planter), Tsukubai (water basins), The Akari (lantern/outdoor shower), and The Tobi-ishi (stone path).
Significance
While rooted in the tradition of Japanese gardens, The Passage illustrates a design approach that does not rely on simple replication of history. There are no torii gates or arched bridges. A contemporary house and landscape, it explores and reinterprets traditional forms, materials, and rituals. In The Passage, a wood arbor with mortise and tenon joinery is translated into a grid of copper piping. Hand-chiseled stone water basins are transformed into cast concrete structures. Rice paper lanterns inspire a light tower made of wood slats. The traditional garden stepping stones become a path of cut bluestone paving. The Tokonoma, a ceremonial niche, extends outside to create a planter for bamboo.
The Passage demonstrates the important role that landscape architects can have in heightening our awareness of the natural environment. As in traditional Japanese gardens, The Passage abstracts and celebrates natural features and processes. The concrete water basins, so distinctive in their form and color, recall the foreign boulders deposited on the site by the glaciers. Rainwater cascades from a 40’ long roof into a basin, and spills into a ring of pebbles. Carefully chosen materials link the garden to the rhythms of nature and the passage of time: the seasonal color of shadblow, the sound of bamboo leaves in the summer winds, the patina on weathered copper.
Special Factors
The project reflects a true collaboration between landscape architect and artist. First conceived in the master plan by the landscape architect, the garden elements (the three water basins and light tower) were then designed, detailed, and sited together with the artists. Materials, forms, and workmanship create a common landscape vocabulary throughout the garden. Copper pipe used in the wisteria arbor reappears in the Garden Sink, The Akari, and the ring of pebbles around The Raincatcher. Pigments in the concrete complement stone paving and plantings.
Illumination of The Akari (outdoor shower) presented a considerable technical challenge. Typical lighting solutions were not feasible – conventional underwater fixtures require continuous water contact for cooling, while other fixtures designed for “wet-dry” applications pose heat or shock hazards. The landscape architect detailed a fiber-optic system which emits a safe, but powerful beam of light from a small crack in the fieldstone paving.
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