Find true north and south with a plumb-lined post and the shadows of sunrise and sunset, checked by the pole star; then turn the principal hall of every compound to face south.
Rules · Site · Materials · Theory
The dry landscape
Where there is no pond or stream, make the landscape of stones alone: set rocks as mountains, cliffs and islands, and let gravel or sand stand for water.
The Sakuteiki already knows the karesansui, “dry mountain and water”, as a part of a larger garden: an area away from the pond and stream where stones are set to suggest a mountain slope or a shore. In the Zen monasteries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it became a garden in its own right, made for contemplation from the veranda of an abbot’s quarters: at Daisen-in a waterfall and river in stone and gravel; at Ryōan-ji fifteen stones in five groups in a rectangle of raked white gravel, arranged so that from no point on the veranda can all fifteen be seen at once.
The gravel is raked into lines that read as water: straight for still water, in rings round the stones as ripples, in waves where it moves. The garden is small, flat and maintained daily.
Related rules
Draw into the garden the views beyond its walls: a distant hill, a neighbour’s trees, a temple roof, the sky above and the water below, and the changes of the seasons. Adapt the design to the site and borrow from what lies round it.
Set stones by first placing a principal stone and then others that answer it, following the “request” each makes; recall famous landscapes; and obey the taboos: a stone that lay flat in nature should not be set upright, nor one that stood upright laid flat.
Lay the mats of a room so that their joints form T-junctions: no point where the corners of four mats meet, and no continuous seam running straight across the room.
Every twenty years build an exact replica of each sanctuary on the alternate site beside it, transfer the deity at night, and dismantle the old buildings.
cycle = 20 years · two sites used alternately
Pitch a roof no lower than its covering allows (roughly 45° for thatch, 35° for plain tiles, 20–25° for slate, 15–20° for interlocking tiles, a few degrees for sheet metal) and steeper where snow lies long or rain is heavy.
thatch ≥ 45° · plain tile ≥ 35° · slate ≥ 22½° · pantile ≥ 17½° · metal ≥ 5° · membrane ≈ 1–2°
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The dry landscape”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/sakuteiki-karesansui. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.