Legendary Aquarist Takashi Amano

October 2013

Legendary among aquarists, Takashi Amano is one of the biggest names in the aquascaping industry. Just look at these exquisite aquariums!

Born in Japan in 1954, Amano is an award-winning photographer, designer and aquarist. His interest and success in aquaria, predominantly freshwater aquarium, led him to found the Japanese company Aqua Design Amano in 1982.

Famous and well respected for his stunning and distinctive style of plant layout, his work has been exhibited across the world. One of our aquarists here at Aquarium Architecture was fortunate enough to be trained by Takashi Amano himself.

Having traveled the globe and visited the world’s largest tropical rainforests in the Amazon, Borneo, West Africa and the pristine forests of Japan, you can see in his images that these adventures are where he draws his inspiration from. With a great appreciation of nature’s fine detail, once saying, “To know Mother Nature, is to love her smallest creations”, he seeks to mimic nature in the appearance of his tank compositions. Using a special arrangement of stone, sand and wood as a starring role in his unique and lushly planted aquariums, with fish being just the ‘supporting cast’, as he puts it, Amano creates amazing natural landscapes.

He also employs Japanese gardening concepts such as Zen rock arrangement and Wabi-sabi. Amano has always done things his own way and he even created his own equipment so that others could follow in his footsteps and create aquascapes like his. His equipment and tanks were specially designed to disappear once aquascaped so that they wouldn’t detract from the beauty inside. Creating aquariums remains a passion of Amano and he is considered the master of scale, detail and replicating beautiful scenes from nature. “Creating nature,” the renowned aquarist said, “is the ultimate luxury.”

All Photos (Credit: Takashi Amano)