Nature Aquarium

The style Takashi Amano built, and the one most people mean when they say aquascaping without knowing whose rules they are following.

“I am not making an aquarium. I am making a small piece of nature that happens to be behind glass.”
Takashi Amano1954–2015

How it got here.

  1. 1982

    Takashi Amano photographs the Oyapock river in French Guiana and starts building tanks that look like the places he shoots.

  2. 1992

    Aqua Design Amano is founded in Niigata. Nature Aquarium Goods sets the format the whole hobby still uses.

  3. 2001

    The first IAPLC. Two hundred entries. By 2015 there are over two thousand from seventy countries.

  4. 2015

    Amano dies. The style outlives him, and the arguments about what counts as Nature Aquarium get louder.

  5. Today

    We build to the principles, not the brand. Golden ratio, one focal point, plants that would grow together in the wild.