Of Ryōan-ji's 'Zen', Michaelangelo and The Glass of Mies

A work of perfection requires you to be in constant struggle of infinite desire. Standing outside of the Miesian house, you feel something lures you to go to the inside. From the inside, the framed landscape could go furthur pinpointing you to go side by side with those sugar maple outside. This is an masterpiece of an act of intensifying elements of nature, much celebrated in the 'borrowed landscape' of Japanese Zen Garden while the one found in Ryoan-ji Temple, Kyoto dubbed to be at its pinnacle.

A granite rock would never own such high gratitude and subtlility if not placing it to a well proportioned and organised Zen rock garden. There, while the rock silently resting on pebbles and stones, an intense and alarming wave remind you of the nature of gravity, and the power of Now, where the composition of that granite rock resting on the ground seem inpenetratable by any kind of forces.


The maple landscape must thanks the glass and steel of Mies, which have help to highlight, intensify and celebrate their existence. It is otherwise feasible to say that without the glass box, you who stand there would never see the intense tipping branches of those sugar maple pointing towards you, touching your fingertips, bringing you, the human, back to the very root of nature, bringing you to a higher level of abstraction in understanding our cosmic action.

"The house is no more than a device to see the world, a mechanism of viewing....The glass house doesn't simply expose the exterior world. It actively turns the world into a highly composed display." -Beatriz Colomina


Edith Farnsworth's machine is at the summit of the power of modern architecture. A piece like that require the touch of a man with skills more than an average craftsman. A man who could explore well in the realm of both subjectivity and objectivity and putting the beholder in the constant struggle of beauty.

The pinpointing touch of maple branch, so intense, in close proximity with the hands in Michelangelo Buonarroti's(1475-1564) diegno "The Creation of Adam"!