Living Traditions: The Water That Holds Us
- Kevin Warren
- 46 minutes ago
- 8 min read
On a Saturday afternoon in Washington Park,
the Portland Japanese Garden Felt Like it was Listening
Not just to the crowd gathering on a weekend that could have been spent anywhere else, but to the smaller things that often go unnoticed until we slow down: the hush between footsteps, the soft insistence of a stream, the way light trembles when it meets a surface. This was the premise of the day for Living Traditions: The Water That Holds Us, not as a topic politely contained inside a lecture, but as a living force that shapes cities, landscapes, and the way communities recover, reconnect, and remember.
New Portland Japanese Garden CEO, Aki Nakanishi, hosted the Living Traditions 2026 series titled Visions of Water: Revitalizing Cities, Landscapes, and Community Life.
Water Has Multiple Dimensions
Balázs Bognár began with a reminder that water is never one thing. “Water has multiple dimensions, environmental, practical, sensory, psychological, and yes, spiritual.” In the language of design, water can be engineered, measured, captured, redirected. But it can also be heard—felt in the body the way you feel time passing in a garden.
Architecture Frames the Surrounding Landscape.
He spoke from the standpoint of architecture that refuses to dominate its site. In his world, the building steps back so place can step forward. “Architecture is a frame through which we see the surrounding landscape.” The sentence carried the weight of tradition—an older understanding that the built world is at its best when it behaves with humility, when it provides shelter and orientation without stealing the scene from what was already there: stone, sky, leaf, and moving water.
The Poetry of the Place Depends on an Unseen Discipline
At Portland Japanese Garden, that philosophy becomes practical, even urgent. Water is part of the visitor’s first sensory experience—present at the outset and changing as you move uphill, changing with weather and season, always familiar and never the same. Yet Bognár pulled back the curtain on the less romantic truth: much of the garden’s water story is a story of risk management and care taken out of sight.
Under courtyards and pathways, water is guided, filtered, and controlled. It cannot be allowed to seep where it would destabilize the ground. It is caught and directed into bioswales and toward cisterns under the parking lot, then released back into the city system “in a measured and~~, and~~ more manageable way.” The poetry of the place depends on an unseen discipline: drainage, filtration, and restraint. Even tranquility, it turns out, can be built—carefully, respectfully, and with deep attention to the land’s memory.
Under courtyards and pathways, water is guided, filtered, and controlled. It cannot be allowed to seep where it would destabilize the ground. It is caught and directed into bioswales and toward cisterns under the parking lot, then released back into the city system “in a measured and~~, and~~ more manageable way.” The poetry of the place depends on an unseen discipline: drainage, filtration, and restraint. Even tranquility, it turns out, can be built—carefully, respectfully, and with deep attention to the land’s memory.
Water Can be Movingly Peaceful, and Unfathomably Violent
But Bognár refused to let water stay safely in the realm of beauty. He reminded the room that nature does not offer comfort on demand. “Water can be movingly peaceful, and it can be unfathomably violent.” He placed himself in time and fear—Tokyo, March 11, 2011—when a massive earthquake shook Japan, and the water that followed “immediately reconfigured the land and completely rewrote the lives of many.”
In that shift—from garden serenity to catastrophe—his message widened. Water is not only an aesthetic medium; it is a force that can erase maps, remake shorelines, and test the bonds between neighbors. And yet, even after devastation, water remains central to how communities attempt to rebuild their daily lives.
It Became a Shared Porch
He showed how recovery can begin with something as ordinary, and as sacred, as a place to gather. A shopping village in Minamisanriku became more than commerce; it became a shared porch, a street-like space between simple structures—rooms for exchanging stories, for seeing the vendor across the way, for hearing the news, for finding your neighbors again. A bridge, rebuilt after destruction, became not just a crossing but a communal surface—wide enough for lingering, for remembrance, for the slow work of repair. Near water, pain lives close to life. The healing is not abstract. It is walked, sat upon, and spoken into being.
Kyoto’s Garden Traditions as both Art and Infrastructure
From there, Professor Shunsaku Miyagi carried the audience further back—past the immediate urgency of storms and into the long inheritance of water as culture. His voice moved through centuries with a steady reverence, tracing Kyoto’s garden traditions as both art and infrastructure.
Even in the earliest examples he described, water was not decoration. It was ideology, advantage, beauty, and survival. Over time, the forms evolved with changing society, religion, and the Japanese understanding of nature. Yet the pattern remained. “In any cases case, the presence of water remains the central feature.”
Miyagi San described a tradition in which gardens “quote” nature, not merely copying scenery, but transforming it into a living language people can enter. Water can be a literal stream or an implied ocean; it can appear as reflective surface or be suggested through sand and stone. The effect is not trickery, it is a way of teaching the senses to see more than what is physically present, to recognize mountain and water as an inseparable pair, a worldview with deep roots.
It Moves Through a Place Like a Bloodstream Through a Body
Then his talk turned, quietly but decisively, toward what modern cities are now forced to confront: water systems as a form of landscape infrastructure. Not only grand, visible waterways, but the full range, major scale down to the intimate micro scale of humidity, airflow, and the way moisture gathers on leaves. His work returned repeatedly to the idea that water is not simply “in” a garden. It moves through a place like a bloodstream through a body, connecting what people see with what they rely on.
In one project, a courtyard’s water plane was thin, only about “10 millimeter thickness” yet designed to create ripples and motion, acting as a mediator between inside and outside. In another, he spoke about reactivating a long-dormant water network, an intricate system that once distributed canal water to gardens, a system that had become dysfunctional over time and needed restoration to function again at scale. When it returns, it not only returns as flow. It returns as identity. “It is the gene of this garden” at the Mitsui Hotel, Kyoto.
It is the Gene of This Garden
Miyagi’s closing thoughts were not sentimental. They were grounded in what cities are now being asked to do: adapt to climate change, build resilience, conserve landscapes, protect biodiversity, and prepare for disaster. His answer was both modern and old-fashioned in the best sense—an insistence that the future will require us to re-learn attentiveness. A garden is not merely leisure. It is a civic teaching tool, a shared space that can sharpen sensitivity to environmental change and remind us that water is always present, even when we stop noticing it.
Yakima Has No Water, Right?
Kathryn Gustafson then shifted the room again, this time into personal memory and the public realm. She did not begin with an ideal landscape. She began with absence. “Yakima has no water, right?” she said, pointing to the dry reality she grew up with. In her childhood, water arrived in a concrete canal—powerful, dangerous, and essential. “If you don't have water, nothing grows.”
It was a plain truth, delivered without romance, and it anchored everything that followed.
Gustafson’s work has lived in public spaces—places where water must do more than look beautiful. It has to serve. It has to cool, filter, protect, gather, teach, and invite. She spoke about early projects where stormwater management wasn’t a side concern but the beginning of her education—learning how water behaves, how it floods, how it drains, how it can be made safe without being stripped of delight.
It’s Their Place, It’s Not Your Place.
Her examples were full of people, even when the images weren’t. In a plaza, jets in pavement allowed children to play “safely.” Water became a guardrail and a reflection, infrastructure and art in one gesture. In Valencia, a city reshaped by rail lines and separation, the act of putting rails underground became the act of re-stitching community life above ground. And above ground, the park was designed as bowls, landforms that hold water, hold activity, hold memory.
Here water was both “natural” and “cultural” filtered and returned to the aquifer through sand, while also appearing as play, interaction, and social connection. The design wasn’t about showing off a designer’s signature. It was about belonging. “It's their place, it's not your place.” She returned to this repeatedly: the public realm requires humility. Water, when used well, can turn a cut-up city into a continuous one again.
Reflect Light and Throw it Back Into the Environment
In Hong Kong, she described how water could be a form of civic symbolism, veils of transparency, bands of earth and light, water positioned where sunlight fell into the center of a constrained site. There, water was designed to “reflect light and throw it back into the environment,” turning a hard urban condition into a place of hope and future. The engineering was serious, connected water circuits, textured stone to shape sound, careful lighting, biodiversity built deliberately, even a nursery grown because the needed plants couldn’t be bought.
And in Osaka, she showed another kind of public revitalization: a large urban park shaped around gathering and family life, bridged over a road the city would not close, while still creating the possibility of weekend events and shared celebration. The water features stayed shallow, safe at the level of ankles, so the civic room could be used by everyone, including children, without fear.
Reflect The Sky
She ended with a drought question from Australia. What happens when a public water feature cannot be filled? Her answer was design that does not depend on abundance. When water isn’t available, the surface must still hold meaning. A three-dimensional patterned plane, polished and dark, could still “reflect the sky” and remain sculptural, an acknowledgment that climates shift, and the public realm must remain generous even when resources are strained.
Water is Not Simply a Material. It Is a Relationship.
Across the three talks, the story of water became unmistakably clear: water is not simply a material. It is a relationship.
In Portland, it is the quiet work beneath the garden that protects the hillside and allows visitors to experience peace. In Kyoto, it is tradition made visible—mountain and water held together as a worldview, refined through centuries of design. In cities around the world, it is the element that can reconnect neighborhoods, cool and animate public life, support biodiversity, and turn forgotten infrastructure into a shared civic future.
And threaded through all of it was an older wisdom, one the modern world is relearning the hard way: water is powerful, generous, and dangerous. It must be respected. It must be designed for. It must be shared.
Because when a city gets water right—when it filters and returns it, frames it, listens to it, and lets it bring people together—water becomes more than a resource. It becomes a common language. It becomes the thing that holds us.
Speakers
Balázs Bognár, KENGO KUMA & ASSOCIATES Shunsaku Miyagi, PLACEMEDIA
Kathryn Gustafson, Gustafson Porter + Bowman
Sponsors
The Living Traditions 2026, Visions of Water: Revitalizing Cities, Landscapes, and Community Life. Series is Sponsored by and brought to you by The Japan Institute of Portland Japanese Garden and the Japan Society.
