Visit the museum's teahouse before the project is dismantled on June 20

A visitor enters the Japanese teahouse that was constructed next to the Johnson Museum last spring. The teahouse is set to be dismantled June 20. Matthew Ferrari/Johnson Museum

Miwa-an, the teahouse built on the grounds of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell in the spring of 2003, is scheduled to be dismantled Sunday, June 20.

Forty Cornell students participated in the spring 2003 Teahouse Project, a seminar run by Marc P. Keane, a garden designer from -- and 18-year resident of -- Kyoto, Japan. Keane has been visiting Cornell for the past year as the Halprin Fellow in the Department of Landscape Architecture. The focus of the project was to study the early development of chanoyu culture, architecture and gardens, as well as to build an experimental teahouse and tea garden outside the Johnson Museum.

"Marc Keane and his students have created an exciting and imaginative expansion of the museum and of our whole feeling for Japanese architecture," said Frank Robinson, the Richard J. Schwartz Director of the museum. "It has been wonderful to have this temporary building here for much longer than we expected."

The teahouse and garden were made by the students almost entirely from natural materials that they collected from forests, fields and farms around Cayuga Lake, including maple saplings, reeds, the stems of willows and red-twig dogwoods, barn boards, river pebbles and field stones. For more information about the Teahouse Project, visit http://www.t-house.info/.