The national American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) recently honored the Portland Japanese Garden‘s Cultural Crossing project with its Award of Excellence. It’s the annual awards program’s highest honor.

Garden Curator Sadafumi Uchiyama and the project’s landscape architecture firm, Walker Macy, were part of a team that included Kengo Kuma & Associates, Hacker, KPFF Consulting Engineers and Hoffman Construction. The Award of Excellence recognized: execution of details; use of a cohesive, place-based and landscape-led design approach; design excellence and technical problem-solving; and balance between Japanese and contemporary design and construction methodologies.

“The Portland Japanese Garden posed highly complex geological, environmental and site development challenges – and we were challenged to create a place that expands the definition of what a Japanese garden can be,” Walker Macy principal landscape architect Chelsea McCann stated in a press release. “The project’s success was made possible by our creative and collaborative architecture, engineering and construction partners. With a shared vision of new garden spaces that seamlessly integrated buildings and the site, our process melded science and art to create a place of meaningful, immersive experiences. This project was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Crews finished building the Cultural Crossing in April 2017. The project has garnered a number of awards, including a regional honor from Engineering News-Record and one from the American Institute of Architects‘ Portland chapter.

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The Portland Japanese Garden added to its list of honors recently when Engineering News-Record (ENR) named the Cultural Crossing expansion its project of the year in the Northwest region.

ENR covers trends as well as construction, engineering and architecture efforts across the country. The organization selects specific projects in individual regions, focusing largely on engineering and construction excellence.

The Japanese Garden project, completed in April 2017, was honored for its attention to detail, craftsmanship and complexity.

“It feels pretty good,” said Chelsea McCann, a Walker Macy principal. “We are absolutely honored to be given the top honors for the region.”

Walker Macy focused on the landscaping as part of a team that included Japanese architecture firm Kengo Kuma & Associates and local architecture firm Hacker. KPFF provided engineering services for the project and Hoffman Construction was the contractor.

“It was a really collaborative project,” McCann said. “We had wonderfully supportive partners and are really happy with the way it turned out.”

ENR isn’t the only organization that has taken notice of the garden expansion. Since debuting in April, it has been honored by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) with a people’s choice award and by the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

The AIA’s Portland chapter recognized the project with its top award in its built category. The judges called it a “serene, pilgrimage-like journey from the city to the forest, drawing each visitor into a fully immersive experience of the traditional arts and culture of Japan.”

“I think what really sets this (project) apart is that the idea was to expand beyond just being a beautiful garden,” McCann said. “They actually wanted to be able do training courses for Japanese garden design. It’s an expansion as a cultural offering.”

ENR praised the intricacies of a retaining wall as well as Kengo Kuma’s designs for buildings that included irregular geometries. Fitting all of the pieces together left virtually no margin for error. To add to that challenge, construction took place during one of Portland’s snowiest winters in years.

“It was tricky,” Hacker principal Jonah Cohen said. “Hoffman (Construction) did a herculean task.”

ENR praised the end result as “one of the most authentic Japanese gardens outside of Japan.”

“Collaborating with Kengo Kuma & Associates and garden curator Sadafumi Uchiyama was a great honor and invaluable experience for Hacker as well as for me personally,” Cohen said. “The project is a true Oregon treasure.”

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J. Douglas Macy, a prominent landscape architect who influenced some of Oregon’s most beloved public spaces, died Nov. 10. He was 72.

In a decades-long career after co-founding Walker Macy with Larry Walker, Macy advocated for and influenced the design of Pioneer Courthouse Square, the Vietnam Veterans of Oregon Memorial and Portland’s Willamette riverfront, among many other projects.

Macy was one of the most important landscape architects in shaping the Pacific Northwest, said Tim Eddy, principal at Hennebery Eddy Architects. Macy was also widely liked.

“He was a fantastic guy,” Eddy said.

Macy had a significant role on the design team for Pioneer Courthouse Square, which often is considered Portland’s “living room.”

“Several aspects of (the square) were things he championed in the design collaboration,” said Paul Dickow, marketing director and associate at Walker Macy.

Macy also supported the founding of the square, which had been a parking lot.

“He championed for it when it was open to political debate,” Dickow said.

Macy was an active civic participant, serving on the boards of the Portland Japanese Garden, the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Northern Arizona University, among others.

He often advocated for state parks and other open and public spaces.

“Doug was a real force for the profession and for the community in his career,” Dickow said, “and he constantly sought to explore what sorts of problems landscape architecture in Portland could tackle.”

Macy was born in Caldwell, Idaho, in 1945 and grew up near Madras. He graduated from Madras Union High School, and then earned a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Oregon.

Macy is survived by three siblings and their families.

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The Portland Japanese Garden debuted its Cultural Village expansion, the first public commission in the United States designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates, earlier this month. The project added several buildings around a sprawling courtyard that will be used for performances, demonstrations, and activities. New buildings include a learning center with a gallery, classroom, gift shop, and library; a garden house, where horticulture workshops will be offered; a tea cafĂ© cantilevering over the hillside, and a ticketing pavilion at the garden’s entrance in Washington park.

Hoffman Construction served as the general contractor on the $33.5 million project. Hacker and Walker Macy worked in partnership with Kengo Kuma & Associates to design the project, as did the garden’s master gardener, Sadafumi Uchiyama.

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Dale Brotherton spent three years learning how to sharpen.

Sharpening tools in the Japanese tradition isn’t complicated – it’s merely dragging the blade of an implement over a stone, over and over. But it was three years before Brotherton could get something sharp.

“It’s a very Japanese thing to delve into details,” he said last week at an elevated workspace at the Portland Japanese Garden, where for nearly a decade he’s fixed and restored the wooden aspects. He’s set to turn over two new installations next month as part of the garden’s “” expansion project – the .

Straight up

There are two reasons why sharpening is considered the foundation of Japanese carpentry. For one, you can’t work if your arm can’t follow a straight line. This is especially true in Japan, where much is still done by hand.

“Training our bodies to move in a straight line, to see in a straight line, is fundamental,” Brotherton said. “The ability to do this is nurtured by the sharpening, and it carries over to all parts of our work.”

The other reason is more obvious – you can’t work without sharp tools. The holy trinity of Japanese hand tools is the plane, the chisel and the saw.

A Western hand plane is a large metal object with levers and knobs. A Japanese hand plane, in contrast, is just a block of wood with a blade wedged inside. But this simple device is surprisingly sophisticated. When Brotherton teaches classes near his home in Seattle, or his shop in Port Townsend, Washington, he and students spend two full days making a hand plane and setting it up to work properly. Planing is another fundamental aspect of Japanese carpentry, as it helps the carpenter show off a wood’s natural beauty, and allows it to age gracefully.

Western hand saws are also quite different from Japanese ones. The Japanese hand saw cuts on the pull-stroke – as opposed to the push – which allows for a thinner blade, and thus greater control. This means finer cuts and a smoother surface. It’s easier to follow a straight line if the cut isn’t rough.

Brotherton and a small crew recently added ceiling panels of Port Orford cedar to the garden’s new Tea Cafe, as work on “Cultural Crossing” winds down. Now 57 years old, the garden is gaining several new buildings and gardens, a cascading water feature and another major craftsman-built feature – an 18.5-foot-tall, 185-foot-long stone castle wall. The finished sides of the dovetail-braced panels were wrapped in paper for protection.

After the panels are hand-planed, the wood will glow and have a different look than any other method of finishing, Brotherton said.

“Sanding wouldn’t even come close,” he said.

Port Orford cedar is a light-colored, fragrant wood nearly identical to hinoki, the premier building wood of Japan. Both are lightweight, rot-resistant and stable. There’s just one problem with Port Orford cedar – there isn’t much of it.

“It’s beautiful when it’s finished,” Brotherton said. “It’s just about everything that you’d want in a wood.”

Details, details, details

Teahouses are the highest form of defined construction in Japan, and everything about them is designed around the tea ceremony. Every element has specific dimensions that can be traced back thousands of years. The tatami mats, for instance, are always a certain size, because it takes a certain number of steps to walk into the tea room.

“There’s no end to how refined you can get with it,” Brotherton said.

The teahouse ceiling is a kind of hybrid project, with both modern and traditional elements. True teahouse construction features only intricate wood joinery – no nuts and bolts. But Brotherton and his three workers were suspending their ceiling panels from a steel building frame.

Brotherton spent the first five years of his apprenticeship near his hometown of San Francisco working under Imai Makoto, a teahouse carpenter from Kyoto. He finished his apprenticeship with four years in Japan, working under a residential builder, Karaki Akita. It was useful being experienced, because Japanese jobsites are less forgiving. Despite the patience required, the pace moves fast, and apprentices must quickly learn to read their boss – his mood, facial expression, posture, etc.

All told, Brotherton needed nine years to become proficient in the Japanese style of carpentry. But, as with all creative pursuits, you never really finish learning as a carpenter, Brotherton said. And you never really get to retire.

“You’re only limited by your own ability, so it’s never-ending growth,” he said. “Eighty-year-old men have told me that they’re still learning. They feel like they’re just getting started.”

Cultural clashing

Needless to say, traditional methods are an odd fit at a modern commercial jobsite.

“It’s a very good example of trying to fit a square peg into a round (hole), so to speak,” Brotherton said.

There’s a debate in construction regarding how best to address the industry’s skilled labor shortage. Some observers believe technology could be the key to enticing the young and tech-minded. For this project, Brotherton actually had to work up a computer model of the teahouse ceiling, a modern skill he doesn’t employ often.

But Brotherton thinks construction’s craft foundation could be what lights fires in young people. He often demonstrates techniques at Japanese cultural festivals.

“The kids are just magnets – they’re glued to the front of my bench,” he said. “And it’s because, physically, there’s something happening.”

But maybe once a young person becomes accustomed to being precise, going back to plywood and nails is a letdown. Kalispell, Montana-custom builder Scott Thomas was another working on Brotherton’s crew last week. He took a course from the master five years ago.

“It can be jarring to go back to lumber from the hardware store,” he said. “To be really frank, it’s kind of like going insane.”

The four carpenters at work in the teahouse house this month were all Americans. One of them, David Laws, is certified to perform the chada, or tea ceremony.

Laws operates in the Mississippi Arts District two Airbnb units he constructed with Japanese and old world carpentry. People from around the world, but especially the Japanese, are fascinated to see traditional work practiced in America, by an American, he said.

“I think it kind of draws them back to their culture a little bit when they see foreigners interested in it, and they take a second look at it,” he said.

The Portland Japanese Garden represents that to a lot of Japanese people who’ve never lived in Japan – a connection to their culture.

“I mean, it’s their Japan,” Laws said.

Portland Japanese Garden “Cultural Crossing”

Cost: $33.5 million

Architect: Kengo Kuma / Hacker

Contractor: Hoffman Construction

Scheduled completion: March 2017

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Portland’s development into an attractive, livable city wasn’t a happy accident, according to city officials, but rather the result of decades of careful planning and decisions made with people – not motor vehicles – in mind.

Officials conveyed that message Tuesday to a visiting delegation of mayors and other government leaders from Japan as part of its FutureCity Initiative, which seeks smart urban planning. This is the first time a FutureCity event has taken place outside of Asia.

Portland Mayor Charlie Hales noted that the city has close ties to Japan, including its oldest sister city relationship (dating to 1959) with Sapporo and its Portland Japanese Garden.

Portland officials were eager to show off the city. They led a tour of the Pearl District on Monday, and a visit of East Portland on Wednesday. On Tuesday, the group met at the Portland Art Museum to share their lessons learned.

The session gave Portlanders an opportunity to bask in their own reputation for smart planning. Zeljka Carol Kekez, a principal at PLACE Studio, pointed to the Pearl District, where Jamison Square provides public space. Smart design in the Pearl led to the city’s biggest housing boom in decades, she said.

Also, nature was brought back into the city, Kekez said, and the local economy was decoupled from carbon emissions. Portland leaders, she said, “transformed freeways into parks, parking lots into neighborhoods and rails into trails.”

Kekez described several successful mixed-use projects, including the Lloyd District’s Hassalo on Eighth (1,600 housing units) and Oregon Square (2,000 housing units), and the South Waterfront District’s Zidell Yards.

Bob Hastings, TriMet‘s agency architect, gave a thorough history of Portland’s development, from automobile-centric postwar plans such as the rejected Mount Hood Freeway to construction of the MAX orange line and Tilikum Crossing.

Hastings said smog and water pollution became major problems in Portland by the 1970s.

“What it had become was an environment that couldn’t sustain life for very long,” he said. “There was a recognition that we needed to change.”

Urban growth boundaries and public transportation were embraced.

“Back we went to mass transit and electric mobility, particularly,” Hastings said.

When some residents expressed displeasure that Portland was becoming a city crisscrossed by freeways, a transit mall was created. Then the city pursued creation of parks, water fountains and other public spaces.

“This is not something that happened out of whole cloth,” Hastings said.

Hales summed up the case for Portland-style planning: If officials can work toward creating livable, prosperous cities, the benefits can be immense.

“The world will come to you, as it has come to Portland,” he said.

The Japanese mayors said they share Portland’s goal of creating easily walkable cities with access to mass transit. Mobility is a particularly acute concern in Japan, where approximately one-third of the population is expected to be older than 64 by 2030.

The Japanese mayors said they’re seeking how to serve a rapidly shrinking and aging population. Masashi Mori, mayor of Toyama, described efforts to encourage density. The city provides purchase subsidies in Residence Encouragement Zones to bring residents closer to the city core and mass transit.

As a result, population is expected to grow in Toyama’s center, even as it shrinks elsewhere.

Major developments are also boosting Toyama’s image, Mori said. Perhaps the most prominent is a Kengo Kuma-designed building that houses a glass art museum, a municipal library and a bank.

The mayors are particularly concerned with revitalizing smaller cities in Japan. Many are losing population to Tokyo, they said.

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Renowned architect Kengo Kuma visited Portland on Saturday to open the first U.S. exhibition of his work and speak at the Portland Art Museum about his design of the Portland Japanese Garden‘s $33.5 million expansion.

That project, Kuma’s first in the U.S., will create the Cultural Crossing. Its three new buildings – a cultural education center, a gardening building and a small tea cafĂ© – will surround a large public plaza. In addition, the garden’s ticket booth will be moved downhill, closer to the parking lot and over a water feature.

Botond Bognar, endowed professor of architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is also chief manager for Kengo Kuma and Associates. He opened the program with a slide show retrospective on Kuma’s work.

Examples ranged from teahouses to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Stadium, but Bognar said there is one guiding principle behind Kuma’s designs.

“Traditional material is what drives his architecture,” Bognar said. “Japanese houses use an extension of nature.”

Kuma said his Olympic stadium design reflects that philosophy and uses wood for structures under the roof. The building also will have no air conditioning.

“I want people to have the smell of wood,” Kuma said. “We have no air conditioning but designed the soffits to use natural wind and louvers. Each (louver) has a different pitch and we control the air by changing the pitch of the louvers.”

The upper outdoor garden spaces of the circular stadium will be open to the public year-round, he said. Accessibility is also very important to the Portland Japanese Garden, Kuma said.

“Katsura Villa (a garden west of Kyoto) is a very beautiful place, but it is separated from daily life,” he said. “Here in Portland it is more connected, and for Japanese (architects) this sends a strong message.”

The Portland Japanese Garden is similar in some ways to the Shugakuin Villa garden, east of Kyoto, Kuma said, except the former has more trees.

“Portland Japanese Garden has deep forests behind the hills,” he said. “It’s not easy to find a big forest in Japan. I don’t want to create too much heaviness on this site. The forest itself is beautiful and the garden should march into the forest.”

Kuma talked about the Cultural Crossing buildings’ green roofs reflecting the Japanese culture while saving energy.

“In a traditional farmhouse in Japan, people would plant sunflowers on the roof,” he said.

Kuma also showed slides of the future Cultural Crossing. One was an overhead rendering of the overlapping and deep-angled roofs in what he called a “ziggy layout” reminiscent of flying geese.

After Bognar and Kuma spoke, they sat in chairs on the museum’s Fields Ballroom stage before about 500 people and fielded questions from moderator Randy Gragg.

Gragg asked about the first step in the design process, and Bognar answered that it always is to visit the site.

“Visit the site, feel the wind, visit the neighbors – next build a model of the site,” he said.

Kuma said he first visited the Portland Japanese Garden in 2008 and was struck by its beauty.

“I was surprised to see the richness, and the garden is amazingly, beautifully maintained,” he said. “I hadn’t seen that kind of relationship between the forest and the garden in a Japanese garden. It’s not a big garden, but because of the up and down, the experience is very rich.”

The Cultural Crossing buildings will have deep eaves, Kuma said, like traditional Japanese houses.

“The teahouse is on the edge of the village, like it’s floating – an amazing location,” he said.

Kuma said the Portland Japanese Garden’s location reminds him of the way Shinto shrines relate to villages in Japan.

“In a Japanese town the shrine would be between the mountains and the flat town, and I love this location very much,” he said. “Portland is very popular (in Japan) because people believe it is a model city of the 21st century.”

The exhibition of Kuma’s work will run through Feb. 29 at the Center for Architecture, at 403 N.W. 11th Ave. More information is available at: .

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The Portland Japanese Garden is one of the most highly regarded of its kind in the U.S., and an to help it achieve even more.

The desired effect of a visit to the garden, according to its website, is for the person “to realize a sense of peace, harmony and tranquility and to experience the feeling of being a part of nature.” The expansion will enhance that effect, thanks in large part to an intense engineering effort – a lot of gritty work that will make that sense of tranquility possible.

The $33.5 million project will create the Cultural Crossing: three new buildings – a cultural education center, a gardening building and a small tea cafĂ© – around a large public plaza. In addition, the garden’s entrance will be moved downhill, closer to the parking lot. The structural footprint will increase by 11,328 square feet to 20,191 total square feet of developed area.

At the construction site, trucks and heavy equipment lumber through the muddy terrain. Slabs have been poured for the buildings. Also, 30-foot-high walls to shore up hillsides on either side of the site are being formed via dozens of vertical steel pilings with horizontal layers of wood lagging holding back the hillside.

But it’s more complicated than that, said Josh Faulkner, construction superintendent for the general contractor, Hoffman Construction. First, two hillsides had to be moved.

“There were two hills that almost touched each other and we had to cut them back to create a giant rectangular space,” he said.

That meant moving thousands of cubic yards of earth off the hillside before structural work could begin.

Next, Faulkner’s crew created a soldier pile wall by inserting 40- to 50-foot steel piles into the ground and securing them with steel tiebacks, said Christopher Pitt of KPFF Consulting Engineers, the engineer of record for the project.

But first, transporting equipment up a narrow roadway to the site was a challenge, Pitt said.

“They had to do some selective excavation so they could get the drill rigs up there,” he said. “Also, working with the tree canopy above was a challenge since you have to take the auger up high and, once you do dig a hole, you have to drop in a soldier pile up to 70 or 75 feet.”

But the hillsides still put pressure on the walls, and to counteract that force, steel tiebacks were attached to the soldier piles, extending into the earth 30 feet at a 30-degree angle and attached to bedrock, and then filled with grout.

Pitt said the soldier pile wall method is fairly common and most often used in constructing basements, and it was deemed the best solution in this case.

“Initially there were design options that were less common or more novel that wouldn’t require soldier piles, but those were deemed more challenging and with less comfort level because they’re not common techniques,” he said.

The hillsides, Pitt explained, are in a historic landslide area but the soldier pile wall ensures stability.

“The whole point is the tieback extends through the part of the hillside that’s wanting to slide and push on the wall and gets anchored solidly in the bedrock,” he said.

All new Cultural Crossing buildings will be rated Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold, said Claire Foster, spokeswoman for the Portland Japanese Garden.

“Now we have two very strong retaining walls and three green-certified buildings that are bolted to each other and bolted to the hilltop,” she said.

Another unseen portion of the project will be construction of 24 geothermal wells — designed by PAE Consulting Engineers — at 300 feet deep. They will provide sustainable heating and cooling for all three Cultural Crossing buildings.

Geothermal energy is not used widely in the Northwest, Faulkner said, but that could change.

“Geothermal is used a lot in Colorado and becoming more so nowadays,” he said. “Like any trend, once someone starts designing that, then everyone else wants to do it too.”

Pitt agreed that geothermal is used less in the Northwest than in parts of the country with more extreme temperatures. The system is more expensive to install, he said, but ensures energy savings in the long term.

“Geothermal wells basically run water through and go very deep down to where the temperature of the earth is static,” he said. “It is a way to get some passive energy efficiency (by) taking advantage of the temperature of the earth … it’s very energy-efficient because the earth does the heating and cooling for you.”

The garden expansion was designed by world-renowned Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. He will be in Portland next month for the opening of an exhibition of his work at the Center for Architecture at 403 N.W. 11th Ave. set to run Feb. 4-29.

Pitt said working on the project has been a memorable experience.

“What’s exciting for us as structural engineers is working with great local architects like Hacker and Kengo Kuma,” he said. “The sky’s the limit for projects they go after.”

Kuma’s design drove the engineering and is “a very precise and demanding design,” Pitt said.

“His structures were very refined and in some cases minimized, with a lot of long roof cantilevers that come down to a very sharp point with very thin edges and straight lines and a very light, fine feel,” he said.

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Kengo Kuma, the Japanese architect in charge of the redesign of the Portland Japanese Garden, recently was picked to design the future National Stadium for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Japan Times, Kuma’s design was selected after several months of reviews. In July, Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, scrapped an earlier design by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid because of its futuristic design and spiraling cost estimates, the article states.

Kuma’s design for the circular stadium features trees and plants inside and around the building. The roof of the round structure, dubbed “the hamburger” in Japan, showcases wood and steel and draws on traditional Japanese architecture.

Lisa Christy, marketing director for the Portland Japanese Garden, said she was happy to hear that Kuma was selected to design the stadium. She said Kuma won the bid for the $33.5 million garden expansion because of his superior design and attention to sustainability.

Kuma decided to bid on the redesign of the Portland garden, Christy said, after visiting it. He called the garden “as beautiful as any in Japan,” she said, and considered the project an opportunity to bridge the cultural gap between the two countries, she said.

The centerpiece of the garden redevelopment will be Kuma’s design for the Cultural Village. Its three buildings will house a learning center, a library, gallery space and a traditional tea cafĂ©. The buildings will all be Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design-rated, Christy said.

“Kuma’s submission was so connected to what we were trying to do,” she said. “His Japanese aesthetic and culture and use of sustainable materials were so in line with what we are trying to do and who we are as an organization, tied to the past while looking forward to the future.”

The garden is Kuma’s first project in North America, Christy said. In early February, the first exhibit of his work, which will focus on the Japanese Garden, will take place at AIA Portland’s Center for Architecture at 403 N.W. 11th Ave. Details will be unveiled at .

The Japanese Garden will reopen on March 1, Christy said, but construction will continue until the formal grand opening on April 1, 2017. Progress can be followed at .

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High-tech buildings crumbled and modern bridges buckled in the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake off Japan’s coast in 2011. But still standing in the devastation were castle walls built by Suminori Awata‘s ancestors.

Awata, a 15th-generation stone mason, is now creating for the Portland Japanese Garden a rock wall that he says will last many lifetimes as well as abide by the Japanese tradition of unified form and function.

“This isn’t going to be a model or a replica. It’s going to be a one-of-a-kind, authentic work of art,” said Claire Foster, spokeswoman for the Portland Japanese Garden. “(Awata) is the real deal.”

On Friday, Awata and a small team chiseled and drove bolts in the dust kicked up by a telescopic handler – a kind of forklift – in the lot of Smith Rock Inc. east of Portland. They were making rough cuts ahead of a major installation at the Portland Japanese Garden, perhaps the largest in its history: a 20-foot-high, 1,000-ton dry-laid stone wall built in the ancient anozumi style.

Awata learned these methods from his father, Jyunji, who learned from his father. Their family’s documented guild lineage stretches to a time of samurai and shoguns. It was for this lofty pedigree that Foster said the Japanese Garden retained his services.

“He might not be a big deal here, but his family is revered in Japan, and he has skills that have been passed down for centuries,” Foster said.

Arrayed around Awata on Friday were about 10 percent of the rocks called for in the project. They’re being shaped for the wall’s top and the bottom – its most important parts, Awata said through a translator. Rather than a straight line, his walls follow a more natural – and structurally-sound – curved path.

Technological advances like forklifts can reduce the risk of injury and accelerate construction, Awata said, but they also remove the human element.

“The human body is the best machine – the body can lift, and the brain can compute,” he said.

After the rocks are cut to shape, they’ll head to a staging area near the park, where they’ll sit until foundation work begins in January. The wall should be finished next summer.

The wall is part of the garden’s $33.5 million Cultural Crossing expansion project, which also includes a cascading water feature and three new buildings. Among the many donors are Arlene Schnitzer ($5 million), various Japanese Garden trustees ($4.5 million) and the Oregon Lottery ($1.5 million). Foster called the cost “a small price to pay for a masterpiece that will last generations.”

The Portland Japanese Garden was founded in 1963 as a symbol of friendship between the U.S. and Japan. The garden overlooks the city on 8.9 acres in the West Hills.

Despite a language barrier, Awata is able to communicate effectively with his workers through eye contact and subtle gestures, according to stone mason Matt Driscoll. He’s one of two Americans requested by Awata to help build the wall. They met the master at one of two workshops he led in the U.S.

“I feel blessed to be able to work with Awata-san, and thrilled to be able to help fulfill his vision,” said Driscoll, operator of O’Driscoll Stone of Petaluma, Calif. “It’s a huge deal to be here with him and be able to share in his knowledge.”

Driscoll and the project’s other apprentice, Kyle Schlagenhauf, are donating some of their time to work with Awata.

“He represents 500 years of service, humility and no compromising,” Schlagenhauf said.

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