Katsura Imperial Villa

The Katsura Imperial Villa – The inspiration of modernists

By: Adulsak "Otto" Chanyakorn

           

The Katsura Imperial Villa is located in Kyoto near the Katsura River. It was built in the early seventeenth-century. The Katsura Imperial Villa was built in the sukiya shoin, a relaxed and personalized combination of standard shoin with various elements of the teahouse. Shoin refers to a building style in the Edo period of Japanese history. It was finished in three main stages: Old Shoin, Middle Shoin, and New Goten. It was built during the Momoya period (1568-1603) and includes four tea- ceremony houses: Shokintei, Shokatei, Shoinken, and Gepparo. It was started in 1620 by the team working under the influence of the great tea master of the Edo period, Kobori Enshu. The KIV is profoundly unified with the environment; it expresses its beauty without using ornamentation. It displays the beauty of simplicity and naturalness. It has become the symbol of architectural modernism and a significant study of Japanese architecture that modernist architects seek to apply to their own design ideologies in terms of the essentials of space, order and form. A great example of integration between architecture and natural elements, KIV includes an impressive pond, garden, rocks, trees and so on. Even the well-known figure in western architectural world, Walter Gropius (1960), admired the humble meaning of this architecture when he wrote in the book Katsura tradition and creation in Japanese architecture, “We feel tremendously attracted to this building even now because man and his way of living were the focus of its conceptions. No Vanity, no pretentious monumentalism was in the mind of the designer, but only the desire to create a balanced container of beautiful living” (p. 8).

            

The Katsura Imperial Village contains the essentials of Zen philosophy in many aspects. Zen is not a religion, but it is an idea of self-education that was influenced by Confucianism and Taoism. Later Japanese people developed Zen to be their own philosophy for the art of living. The Katsura Imperial Villa was designed asymmetrically without a main axis. The remarkable skill of wooden craftsmanship can be seen in the construction and expression of simple beauty in structure. The overall building scale that correlates with human scale represents the humility as in the Zen spirit. KIV demonstrates the perfect juxtaposition between dark and bright, smooth and rough, architecture and garden. All of these express the essential aspects of the everyday art of living of Japanese people. The Katsura Imperial Villa is a great example of Japanese architecture of simplicity and naturalness, which shows no distinction based on social class. The houses of a regular man and a prince differ only on the size and quality of materials (Gropius, 1960).

References:

Ishomoto, Y. (1960). Katsura tradition and creation in Japanese architecture: New

     Haven, CT: Yale University Press.