As Robert Singer, the Japanese art curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, once commented when he kindly acted as my guide during a visit to Japan, “the oldest temple in Japan never goes over the age of twenty.” The working temple is built on a single platform, and the empty site beside the shrine is both where the previous temple once stood and also where the next will be built: a clear expression of the balance between full and empty, continuity and discontinuity, reflecting the Shinto belief in the perpetual renewal of nature and man as well as a means to pass building techniques from one generation to the next. (If venice dies , Settis)
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