China, Japan and Korea

For more than two thousand years, from the Yellow River to Kyoto and from Seoul to Hanoi, people built in essentially the same way. A platform of earth or stone lifts the building off the damp ground. On it stands a frame of wooden columns and beams that carries the whole weight of the roof, so that walls, doors and windows are merely screens set between the posts. Over the frame spreads a great roof of tiles or thatch, deeper and heavier than any roof in Europe, whose overhanging eaves are held up by clusters of brackets. A master carpenter of the tenth century, Yu Hao, is remembered for saying that a building has three parts (the platform below, the body in the middle and the roof above), and the formula still describes the East Asian hall better than any other.

This is an architecture of wood, and wood burns and rots. Few buildings are older than a few centuries, and even the famous survivors have been repaired, dismantled and reassembled many times. But because the system was written down (in the Chinese state manuals, in the Japanese carpenters’ scrolls), and because it was taught from master to apprentice with extraordinary continuity, we can follow its rules more closely than those of almost any other tradition outside the classical West.

The bay and the module

The unit of the Chinese building is the jian, the bay between two columns. A hall is described by its bays (“five jian wide, three deep”) and almost always has an odd number across the front, so that the axis passes through a doorway rather than a column. The central bay, the mingjian, is the widest; the others diminish toward the ends. A building grows by adding bays, and a compound grows by adding buildings around courts; the bay is to East Asian architecture what the intercolumniation is to the classical temple.

Within the bay, every member was measured in a module. The Yingzao fashi, the building manual compiled by Li Jie for the Song government and printed in 1103, begins its chapters on carpentry with the principle that all building takes the cai as its basis. The cai is the section of a standard timber, fifteen units high and ten wide; the unit is the fen. A builder chooses one of eight grades of cai according to the rank and size of the building (the largest for halls of nine or eleven bays, the smallest for garden pavilions), and then every arm, block, beam, rafter and column follows in fen. It is the exact counterpart of the classical module, the column diameter in which Vitruvius and Vignola measured the orders (The Doric module): change the grade and the whole building rescales without losing its proportions.

The bracket set

The most distinctive member of the system is the bracket set, dougong in modern Chinese, puzuo in the Song manual. It sits between the top of the column and the roof, and it solves a real problem: how to carry eaves that project three or four metres beyond the columns, far enough to keep rain off the timber and the earthen platform. A single cantilevered beam of that length would be enormous. Instead the carpenter stacks short pieces. On the column head sits a great bearing block, the lu dou; in its cross-slots rest two arms, the gong, one along the façade and one projecting outward; on the ends of the arms sit smaller blocks, which carry longer arms, and so on, each tier stepping out by up to 30 fen and rising by 21. The load of the eaves is collected, tier by tier, back to the column.

Where the eaves had to reach further still, Tang and Song carpenters used the ang, a long slanting timber that runs down and out through the bracket set like the arm of a see-saw. Its outer end carries the eave; its tail, rising inside the building, is pinned down by the weight of an interior purlin. The ang lets the eaves project far without lifting them so high that they darken the hall.

The history of the bracket set is a history of diminishing structure and growing ornament. In the Tang East Hall of Foguang Si (857) the brackets are nearly half as tall as the columns and do real work. By the Ming and Qing, when beams took over more of the load, bracket sets had shrunk to a fifth of the column height or less and were set closely along the eaves as a richly painted frieze; the Qing regulations of 1734 measured them in doukou, a module smaller than the Song cai. Japan and Korea took the bracket set in its early, structural form and developed it separately: the cloud-shaped brackets of Hōryū-ji, the plugged-in arms of the Great Buddha style, the winged ikgong of Joseon houses.

Refinements

Like the builders of the Parthenon, the Song carpenters corrected the straight lines of their buildings. The columns of a hall rise slightly from the centre toward the corners (two Song inches for each column outward, a few centimetres at the corners of a seven-bay hall), so that the eave line curves gently up at the ends (shengqi). The outer columns lean inward, one part in a hundred on the front and back and eight in a thousand on the ends (cejiao), which stiffens the frame against the racking of wind and earthquake. The ends of bracket arms and the upper third of the columns are rounded in facets (juansha), as the classical column swells with entasis (Vignola’s entasis: straight for a third, curved above). Korean builders knew the same corrections as gwisoseum and anssollim.

The roof and its ranks

The roof was drawn by the rule of jǔzhé, described in the chapter on roofs: raise the ridge by a third of the depth, then depress each purlin below it from a straight line by a tenth, a twentieth, a fortieth of the rise. Because the Chinese frame sets every purlin on its own post (The raised-beam frame: purlins at any height), the section can be curved at will, and the eaves grow outward and rise toward the corners (Let the eaves grow out at the corners).

The shape of the roof declared the rank of the building. The hipped wudian, with four slopes, was the most exalted; the hip-and-gable xieshan, a hipped lower roof with a gable above, came next; the overhanging gable xuanshan and the flush gable yingshan roofed ordinary halls and houses. Doubling the eaves raised any type a step, so that the double-eaved hipped roof of the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City stands at the top of the scale. Colour and ornament ran in parallel (yellow glazed tiles for the emperor, green for princes, grey for everyone else), and so did the ridge: great chiwen at its ends, and on the hips a file of little beasts, whose number rose with the rank of the building.

Courts, axes and cities

Chinese builders did not make buildings bigger; they made more of them. A house, a temple or a palace is a set of halls arranged around courtyards along a north–south axis, each hall facing south toward the sun and away from the cold north wind. The Beijing courtyard house, the siheyuan, is the model in miniature: the main hall stands at the north of the inner court facing south, side halls face each other across it, and the family enters from the street by a gate in the south-east corner, turns past a screen wall, crosses an outer court and passes through a decorated inner gate. The Forbidden City is the same composition multiplied a hundredfold.

℟Orient by the sun and face the main hall south

Find true north and south with a plumb-lined post and the shadows of sunrise and sunset, checked by the pole star; then turn the principal hall of every compound to face south.

The same logic governed the city. The builder’s chapter of the Kaogong ji, written perhaps in the fourth or third century BC, describes the ideal royal capital: a square nine li on a side, three gates in every wall, nine roads running north–south and nine east–west, the palace at the centre, the ancestral temple on its left and the altar of soil and grain on its right, the court in front and the market behind. No city was built exactly so, but the diagram shaped the great planned capitals (Sui and Tang Chang’an, Yuan Dadu, Ming and Qing Beijing) and, through them, Heian-kyō (Kyoto), Nara and Joseon Seoul.

The pagoda

Buddhism brought a new building type, the tower of relics. The Indian stupa, a solid mound with a mast and parasols, met the Chinese multi-storeyed timber tower and became the pagoda: a stack of storeys each with its own projecting roof, crowned by a metal spire that preserves the stupa’s mast and rings. China built pagodas in timber, brick and stone; the timber pagoda of Yingxian in Shanxi, of 1056, octagonal and about 67 m high, is the tallest surviving. Japan, with its abundant timber and frequent earthquakes, kept to wood, and its pagodas have proved astonishingly durable. They owe much to two rules: the storeys diminish upward, so that the mass is low and wide, and the great central pillar, the shinbashira, rises free through the middle without carrying the storeys.

Japan: shrine and temple

Japan had an architecture before it had Buddhism. The Shintō shrines preserve it: raised halls of unpainted cypress with posts sunk straight into the ground and thick thatched gables, crossed at each end by the extended bargeboards called chigi and weighted on the ridge by billets called katsuogi. At Ise the sanctuaries of the sun goddess are built in the shinmei-zukuri style and rebuilt, beside the old ones, every twenty years; at Izumo the square, towering taisha-zukuri is entered up a long stair on the gable end.

Buddhist architecture arrived from Korea: carpenters, tile-makers and painters from the kingdom of Baekje built Japan’s first temple from 588. The golden hall and pagoda of Hōryū-ji, rebuilt after a fire in 670 and complete by the early eighth century, preserve their style: columns with a strong entasis, cloud-shaped brackets on the column heads only, a lower storey of five bays and an upper of four. In the eighth century the state temple of Tōdai-ji raised the largest timber hall the world had seen. Later imports from China (the bold “Great Buddha” style of the 1190s and the delicate Zen style of the thirteenth century) joined the native manner, but Japanese carpenters bent everything they borrowed toward gentler curves, deeper eaves and plain unpainted wood, and invented the hidden roof (The hidden roof: separate the eaves from the weather) to separate the eaves that are seen from the roof that keeps out the rain.

Japanese carpenters codified their proportions as kiwari, a chain of ratios deriving every member from the bay or the column. The best-known text, the Shōmei of the Heinouchi family, master carpenters to the Tokugawa shoguns, set out in 1608 the kiwari of gates, shrines, pagodas, halls and residences in five secret scrolls.

℟Kiwari: size every member from the bay

Fix the bay (the distance between column centres) and derive every other member from it by fixed ratios: the column from the bay, the brackets and beams from the column, the rafters and their spacing from the brackets, the eaves from the rafters.

Japan: the room

The Japanese house is perhaps the purest modular architecture ever built. From the fifteenth century the reception rooms of warriors and monks developed into the shoin style: floors covered wall to wall with tatami mats, rooms divided by opaque sliding fusuma and closed to the veranda (engawa) by translucent shoji, and the principal room given a tokonoma alcove for a scroll and flowers. The mat, the sliding panel and the post interval all derived from one unit, the ken of six feet, so that a room could be named, drawn and built by the number of its mats. Custom forbade laying the mats so that four corners met (the grid laying was reserved for funerals), and the pinwheel arrangement that results is also the soundest craft, locking the floor together like bricks in bond.

The tea masters of the sixteenth century reduced the room to four and a half mats or fewer, and made of rough plaster, bamboo and bark-covered posts the rustic refinement called sukiya; the seventeenth-century Katsura villa in Kyoto set sukiya buildings stepping along a garden, their proportions governed throughout by the mat.

Korea: the heated floor and the lifted eave

Korea was the bridge by which the Chinese system reached Japan, and it developed an architecture of its own. The oldest surviving timber halls, of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Bongjeongsa, Sudeoksa, Buseoksa), have bracket sets on the column heads only and columns with a pronounced entasis. Under the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) palaces such as Gyeongbokgung used bracket sets between the columns as well, while houses and lesser buildings used simple winged brackets. Korean roofs are covered with heavy giwa tiles on a bed of earth and painted beneath with bright dancheong; their eaves lift gently at the corners and bow outward in plan, so that the roof seems to hover.

In the house, the hanok, two climates meet. The ondol of the cold north heats the floor itself: the kitchen fire, set a step below the rooms, sends its smoke through stone flues under the floor slabs of the main room to a chimney on the far side, and people sit and sleep on the warm stone. The maru of the warm south is a raised floor of timber boards, open to the breeze. The hanok puts them side by side under one roof: heated rooms for winter, an airy hall for summer.

Legacy

The East Asian frame anticipated several of the ideas that Western architects would call modern: a structural skeleton independent of the walls, an interior that flows from room to room behind sliding partitions, standardised prefabricated parts, and a building that opens to its garden. Frank Lloyd Wright saw a Japanese temple pavilion at the Chicago fair of 1893 and never forgot it (organic architecture); Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius praised Katsura as a model of functional beauty; and after the Second World War Japanese architects such as Kenzo Tange translated the rafters and beam-ends of temple carpentry into exposed concrete. The modern movement found in the East Asian house what it had been looking for, and the Song carpenters would have recognised in the modular grid the rule of the cai.