Moods Touch wood TEXT Michel Desvigne In Kyoto, I marveled as I walked on the wooden engawa, those raised platforms that run around the outside of traditional homes, creating in the process a frame for Japanese gardens. Cut, sanded and polished over time, these wooden floors offer the sensual pleasure of padding along them barefoot as you gaze, in fascination, at the miniature coded landscapes in the center of the frame. It’s the proportions that are extraordinary: endless floors like wooded horizons showcasing the tiniest of forests. How delightful that the word “wood” designates both the material and a tree-filled landscape. In Tokyo, this summer, I strolled a while in a garden created five years ago in the Otemachi financial district, opposite the Imperial Palace. I had been commissioned to design it ten years earlier. A skyscraper had to be torn down in order to build another one in its stead. Oddly enough, the commission stipulated that a “primary forest” was to be planted. Botanists at the Imperial Garden enlightened me to the fact that in 1983, Emperor Hirohito had created a natural forest within the palace grounds identical to the Musashino woodland once covering the western part of Tokyo but no longer in existence. It was an intriguing process: the soil was literally extracted from the original Musashino site and transported, intact, to the palace. The seeds, roots and organisms in the soil helped revive the ecosystem which I was to reproduce. Together with the Japanese botanists, we carried out a highly unusual and accelerated experiment. During the long period required for construction, the entire forest, both soil and trees, was “pre-cultivated” in a mountain clearing. This living environment, a kind of landscape essence, was then entirely transferred to Otemachi. The idea of combining mountain landscapes, the emperor’s wood and this garden brings a kind of joyful feeling. Like in Kyoto, this has to do with artifices that evoke landscapes. Paradoxically, both of these woods, created through the use of sophisticated techniques, are almost invisible because they look so natural, at least for now. It may sound a tad absurd to describe a wood as being contemporary. Yet I believe they are: in the way they were created, by the apparent disappearance of the blue- print that gave them shape, and, especially, by their precious and huge significance in the midst of a huge city. I like to see in this immensity, as in the Kyoto gardens, a certain beauty. 31