The designers and builders of the Balboa Japanese Friendship Garden expansion follow the same philosophy of landscape design that I do. This is quoted from the San Diego Union Tribune article about the expansion of the Japanese Friendship Garden dated Aug 11, 2013. “ …the idea that the land determines many of the garden’s features. “As you design and construct it, you really feel the land itself and the plant materials you place around,” Otsuji said. “It’s not something you put on a piece of paper and that’s what you are going to build. It’s something you kind of feel as you go along with the typography of the land.” The city of San Diego, however, needed more than feelings in permitting and approving the garden design… Otsuji made sure the city received a full set of working drawings. “But one of the things I told them at the very beginning was that we’re probably not going to follow many of the things that are on here (the plans) because the way it’s actually built,” he said. “That’s not to say we’ll ignore health-safety; we will follow the health-safety issues, but all the other ones, there’s going to have to be a lot of latitude.”
Posted on: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 19:12:52 +0000