Mirei Shigemori

Mirei Shigemori (1896-1975), a landscape architect and scholar trained in painting, flower arranging, and tea ceremony, is increasingly admired for his contemporary Japanese garden designs. Believing that the Japanese dry landscape garden (or Zen garden) had fallen into cliche, Shigemori applied modernist shapes, colors, and materials to create stunning avant-garde works that also celebrated the ancient gods and beliefs at the heart of Japanese culture. This book explores ten major

Shigemori works-from the checkerboard garden of Tofuku-ji (1939) and the revolutionary tea garden at Tenrai-an (1969) to the masterful stone settings at Matsuo Taisha (1975)-using design/cultural analysis, garden plans, photographs, and Shigemori's own words.