ABSTRACT
There are several vernacular solutions to the problem of integrating open space into a building enclosure. A Samurai named Jozan Ishikawa built the sukiya-style retreat. He commissioned Kano Tan'yu to paint portraits of 36 Confucian poets that he selected, and wrote an inscription below each of them, giving this house the name Shisen no ma, or Hall of the Immortal Poets. Azaleas also play an important role in another famous garden across the Pacific, at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, completed by Richard Meier in 1997, and it serves as a particularly apt reminder of the essential difference between this paradigmatic example of the traditional Japanese attitude about the importance of the integration of architecture and nature, and the Western, Modernist aversion to it. Sou Fujimoto has invoked the engawa in a different way by skillfully weaving internal and external spaces together in his two-story Musashino Library, connected to a newly renovated Art Museum for the University.
