From arrangement to architecture: the evolution of the Sogetsu School founded by Sōfū Teshigahara
“In ikebana, flowers become you.”
Traditionally, ikebana was a practice of following established forms, a rigid spiritual ritual, with highly sanctified signifiers setting the tone for the entrance to tea ceremony. One of the best parts of Japanese culture is how strict it is and how radical those are who escape and redefine its traditions - think Rei Kawakubo of Commes des Garçon, Kazuo Shiraga of the Gutai Movement, Kazuo Ohno the Butoh dancer and Sōfū Teshigahara. Born in 1900 at the turn of the century, Teshigahara learned flower arranging from his father - by the age of 27 he started his own school, Sogetsu Ryu which grew to over a million students. He believed that once one had learned the rules and mastered the techniques of ikebana, there was a whole realm of freedom for personal expression.
When Teshigahara started Sogetsu Ryu, his brief was simple and generous. Keep the discipline of placement, interval, and the technique but work for the feeling of the present. Let anyone learn. Use what the idea needs. Scale the work to the site, not just the table. It sounds obvious now. At the time it turned arrangement into a way of shaping space, not just decorating it. That simple shift placed him at the front of modern ikebana.
Teshigahara's work evolved alongside that of the school. Iron and scrap metal appears early as a main character rather than a hidden armature. The “vase” could now become the air, the street, the stage. Materials widened: vines, planks, scrap metals, three dead logs - nothing was off the table. And quite literally, everything moved off the table. Eventually his work moved towards sculpture and painting with no plant material at all. Soon after, plants return at a different scale. Roots, bark, and long runs of wisteria behave like architecture.
Material thinking keeps evolving. In the mid 1950s Sōfū experiments with moving a form from wood into metal. Metal is poured into carved timber, then lifted, cut, and welded into a new body that still remembers the grain and volume inside. The point is not illusion, but rather that form can migrate across matter and keep its character. A gesture can survive the swap from bark to copper or iron. Time becomes a material to work with too. He eschewed normal modes of operating as an artist - not really titling or dating his works, making works and then dissembling them to create new works.
After the war, Sogetsu evolves from an ikebana school into a cultural hub. From the late 1950s onwards, the Sogetsu Art Center hosts concerts, screenings, dance, experimental film and Fluxus performances and happenings featuring a range of Japanese artists such as the composers Tōru Takamitsu & Toshi Ichiyanagi, as well as New York artists of the time such as Yoko Ono, Rauschenberg, John Cage, Nam June Paik.
Teshigahara, as an artist, expanded his work onto paper, where he believed thinking is quick and exact, that a few strokes can carry the logic of a large piece. The drawings show the same habits as his sculpture. Edit hard. No decoration. Let the gesture speak and let the quiet around it do half the work.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, Teshigahara traveled across Europe and the United States, giving demonstrations and exhibitions. Audiences read the work as sculpture as well as ikebana, which was the point. He kept true to the core of the tradition and tested how far its principles could go: line, mass, interval, breath. No longer tied to a vase, the language could shape rooms, plazas, and stages. He worked late into his life and died in 1979.
In 1978, the year before his death, the Sogetsu Art Center reopened on the same site as the original, with a brand new 11 story building designed by architect Tange Kenzō and Hiroshi Teshigahara (Sōfū's filmmaker son) was handed the baton to serve as the director. The crown jewel of this living breathing space was the installation that Isamu Noguchi created, an indoor stone garden called “Heaven” in the open space known as Sogetsu Plaza which is how it remains to this day in Tokyo.
