Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion, officially Rokuon-ji or Deer Garden Temple, began when shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu bought a statesman’s villa in 1397 and built the pavilion around 1399 as part of his retirement complex. His son turned it into a Zen temple after his death, as Yoshimitsu had wished. The gold leaf on the top two floors was meant to purify negative thoughts about death, catching sunlight off the Mirror Pond. The 12.5 meter building stacks three styles: the Chamber of Dharma Waters in the 11th century imperial aristocratic style, the Tower of Sound Waves in the samurai style with lattice windows and a shrine to Kannon, and the Cupola of the Ultimate in Chinese Zen style, holding Buddha relics beneath a bronze phoenix.

The pavilion was the only building in the complex to survive the Onin War of the 1460s and 1470s, and it stood for over 500 years. Then at 2:30 a.m. on July 2, 1950, 22 year old novice monk Hayashi Yoken set it on fire, destroying the original statue of Yoshimitsu. He fled to a hill and attempted suicide, was sentenced to seven years, was released in 1955 in failing health, and died of tuberculosis in 1956. The event inspired Yukio Mishima’s 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. A reconstruction was completed in 1955, and in 1986 and 1987 the top floors were recoated with 20 kilograms of gold leaf five times thicker than the original.

• How lattice windows on the samurai floor cast shifting shadows as a reminder of impermanence
• Shakkei, or borrowed scenery, pruning garden trees to blend with the mountains beyond the temple walls
• Ten islands in the Mirror Pond, the largest representing Japan itself
• Four stones in a line representing sailboats bound for the Isle of Eternal Life
• Why rebuilding with thicker gold reflects a view of preservation unlike the material focus of Notre Dame’s restoration