Borrowed scenery

Borrowed scenery (借景; Japanese: ; Chinese: ) is the principle of "incorporating background landscape into the composition of a garden" found in traditional East Asian garden design. The term borrowing of scenery ("shakkei") is Chinese in origin, and appears in the 17th century garden treatise Yuanye. A garden that borrows scenery is viewed from a building and designed as a composition with four design essentials: 1) The garden should be within the premises of the building; 2) Shakkei requires the presence of an object to be captured alive as borrowed scenery, i.e. a view on a distant mountain for example; 3) The designer edits the view to reveal only the features he wishes to show; and 4) The borrowed scenery is linked with and reflects the foreground of the garden. Humble Administrator's Garden, Suzhou Summer Palace, Beijing Master of the Nets Garden, Suzhou Murin-an garden, Kyoto Shugaku-in Imperial Villa, Kyoto Isuien Garden, Nara Ritsurin Garden, Takamatsu Genkyu-en, Hikone Castle Adachi Museum of Art, Yasugi Sengan-en, Kagoshima Joju-in garden, Kyoto Borrowing scenery, as a technique of design was conceptualized in modernist architectural theory in the 1960s. This understanding was made explicit among Japanese architects, for whom it was the utmost effort to design continuity of interior and exterior space, a major topic in modernist architecture. Architects from the International Style in modern architecture acclaimed things like simplicity and space in Japanese architecture. Seen from the perspective of architecture theory borrowing scenery was seen as a fixed three-dimensional plasticity, whence shakkei is usually translated as "borrowed" scenery. According to the 1635 CE Chinese garden manual Yuanye (園冶), there are four categories of borrowed scenery, namely: yuanjie (遠借 "distant borrowing", e.g., mountains, lakes), linjie (隣借 "adjacent borrowing", neighboring buildings and features), yangjie (仰借 "upward borrowing", clouds, stars), and fujie (俯借 "downward borrowing", rocks, ponds).