Zen Isovists

The stone garden at Ryoanji, a Zen Buddhist Temple in Kyoto, is famous for the particular arrangement of its five clusters of stones: one can never see all the stones in their entirety at once. Some part of the scene is always obscured, no matter how hard one looks. Regardless of whether the garden's creators intended this effect, it has fascinated me. I wondered how one could set about to design a garden in this way. To investigate, I created a program that randomly generated other stone arrangements and checked them to see if they satisfied this condition, producing valid examples by brute force. To make this process more interactive, I created another program for visualizing what are essentially inverse-isovists: regions color-coded by how many stones can be seen at one time if one stands within them. In the images shown here, the lightest regions are those from which all of the "stones" in the "garden" can be seen in their entirety. With each darker shade, one more stone is occluded. Notice how quickly they are hidden as we add two, three, then five stones. Feel free to play with it yourself.

Two objects within a boundary...

Three...

And five. Note how quickly the distinct visibility regions have multiplied.