The printed pattern books of the Edo period, which put the carpenters’ kiwari, the ken grid, standard tatami rooms and the details of doors, shelves and alcoves into the hands of ordinary builders and their clients.
Once woodblock printing became commercial in the seventeenth century, carpenters’ knowledge that had been guarded in family scrolls such as the Shōmei began to appear in cheap illustrated books. Hundreds of titles on gates, shrines, shelves, alcoves and joinery were printed between the late 1600s and the Meiji era.
They record the practice of the townhouse and farmhouse as much as that of the temple: rooms counted in mats, walls set out on the ken grid, the standard sizes of shōji and fusuma, and the conventions for laying mats and placing the alcove. This book cites them for those customary rules, which were shared by builders across Japan rather than invented by any single author.
The book, part by part
I The ken grid and the mat
Rooms laid out on a column grid of one ken (6 shaku); Kyoto and Edo standards of mat size.
Rules: Plan on a grid of one ken · Kyoto mats and Edo mats · Never let four corners of mats meet
II Roofs, gates and torii
Hidden roofs over deep eaves; torii of the shinmei and myōjin families.
Rules: The hidden roof: separate the eaves from the weather · Two families of torii