Marc Peter Keane

Marc Peter Keane is a landscape architect, artist and writer whose office is in Kyoto. Born near New York, he graduated from Cornell University’s department of landscape architecture and moved to Kyoto in the mid-1980s, staying eighteen years: first as a research fellow at Kyoto University, then as a designer and writer with his own studio downtown, the first person in Japan to hold a working visa as a landscape architect.

His built work is mostly gardens, for private houses, company grounds and temples, together with a park in Tokushima and a historic district in Nagano, and it blends Eastern and Western aesthetics. He writes non-fiction on Japanese gardens and literary fiction, and his artwork, from ceramics to large installations, stays tied to gardens and nature. He taught at the Kyoto University of Arts and Design and at Cornell.