Studies on Characteristics of Japanese Gardens

On the curvature analysis of garden pathes and the garden type

Abstract

This study is about the features in the organization of spaces and/or visual forms in traditional Japanese gardens, on basis of anarizing curves in garden pathes. The curved pathes in Japanes gardens is able to divided into curves and lines in a plan.(See Fig. 1) We measured out the average curvatures of those pathes in thirty typical Japanese gardens.
From the reration between each garden area and its average curvature, the gardens are classified three groupes as follows;(1) Kyoto-gosyo type which has picturesque landscape with many small curvature pathes, (2) Katsura-rikyu type which consists of some minor spaces with small curvature pathes, and (3) Syugakuin-rikyu type of which hole site is able to be looked at on a place with large scaled curvature pathes.
The relation between the radius (r) and the arc (1) of the average curvature is found as r=-0.42+1.921. The standard radiuses of curvature at each classes of path width are resulted as Table 2.