---

Buy this book from:

Amazon.com	A local independent bookseller

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 cliché, 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 Tôfuku-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.

Christian Tschumi is a practicing landscape architect with degrees from Switzerland, the United States, and Japan. He wrote his dissertation on Mirei Shigemori and the renewal of the Japanese garden. Markuz Wernli Saito is a visual artist and photographer interested in the dialectic of humans and their environments. He works in Japan, Europe, and the United States.