The Textbook of Architecture

Styles · East Asia

Japanese

also Japanese traditional architecture, Wayō

Walk through Heian-kyō, the capital of peace →
When
AD 588 – 1868
Where
Japan
Rules
29
PlateThe golden hall (kondō) of Hōryū-ji, late seventh century: cloud brackets, entasis columns, a hipped lower roof and an irimoya upper roof; the pent skirt (mokoshi) was added in the eighth century. Open in Models ↗

The timber architecture of Japan: Buddhist halls and pagodas learned from China and Korea and steadily transformed, an indigenous shrine tradition of unpainted wood and thatch, and a domestic architecture of posts, sliding screens and mats laid out on a module of one ken.

Two traditions met in Japan. The older is that of the Shintō shrine: a raised granary-like hall of unpainted cypress with a thatched gable roof, posts sunk straight into the ground, crossed finials (chigi) and billets (katsuogi) on the ridge. Its purest form, the shinmei-zukuri of Ise, has been rebuilt on alternate sites every twenty years for well over a thousand years, so that a building of the seventh century survives as a form rather than as timber (Rebuild the shrine every twenty years).

The second arrived with Buddhism in the sixth century. Craftsmen from the Korean kingdom of Baekje built the first temple, Asuka-dera, from 588, and the late-seventh-century hall and pagoda of Hōryū-ji, among the oldest timber buildings in the world, preserve their style: entasis columns, cloud-shaped brackets, a lower storey of five bays and an upper of four. In the Nara period the state temple of Tōdai-ji raised the largest timber hall ever built to house its bronze Buddha. Later waves of Chinese influence brought the “Great Buddha” style of the 1190s, with bracket arms plugged through the columns, and the Zen style of the thirteenth century, with bracket sets between the columns, fan rafters and cusped windows.

Japanese builders changed what they borrowed. Deep eaves in a rainy climate led, from the tenth century, to the hidden roof (noyane): a second, steeper roof built above the visible rafters on great cantilever beams, so that the eaves seen from below could be as low and wide as the designer wished (The hidden roof: separate the eaves from the weather). Curves were softened, colour often abandoned, and the hip-and-gable irimoya became the favourite roof of temple and house alike. Carpenters codified their knowledge as kiwari, proportional rules deriving every member from the bay or the column, set down most fully in the Shōmei of 1608 (Kiwari: size every member from the bay).

In the houses of warriors and later of townsmen, the shoin style fixed the Japanese interior: rooms floored wall to wall with tatami mats, divided by sliding fusuma and shōji, with a tokonoma alcove for a scroll and flowers. Because the mat, the post interval (ken) and the sliding panels all belonged to one system, a room could be named and built by the number of its mats: four and a half for a tea room, eight for a formal chamber (Plan on a grid of one ken, Never let four corners of mats meet). The tea masters of the sixteenth century and the builders of the Katsura villa refined it into the rustic elegance of sukiya.

That domestic architecture (modular, open-planned, light, with its structure frankly shown and its garden drawn into the room) was admired by Western architects from the 1890s. Frank Lloyd Wright saw the Hōōden pavilion at the Chicago fair of 1893; Bruno Taut in 1933 held up Katsura as a model of functional beauty; and the grid, the sliding wall and the flowing plan passed into modern architecture.

Fig. 1Shinmei-zukuri, the style of Ise: entered on the long side, with chigi, katsuogi and free-standing ridge posts. Open in Models ↗
Fig. 2A five-storey pagoda of Hōryū-ji type; the top storey is half as wide as the first. Open in Models ↗
Fig. 3An eight-mat room: no four corners of mats meet. Open in Models ↗

The rules of Japanese

Each covering has its lowest pitch

Pitch a roof no lower than its covering allows (roughly 45° for thatch, 35° for plain tiles, 20–25° for slate, 15–20° for interlocking tiles, a few degrees for sheet metal) and steeper where snow lies long or rain is heavy.

thatch ≥ 45° · plain tile ≥ 35° · slate ≥ 22½° · pantile ≥ 17½° · metal ≥ 5° · membrane ≈ 1–2°

The jōbō grid: blocks of forty jō

Divide the capital into blocks (machi) forty jō square; gather sixteen blocks into a ward (bō) and the wards into rows (jō); separate the blocks by lanes of four jō and the wards by avenues of eight to twelve, and make Suzaku-ōji, the central avenue, twenty-eight.

machi = 40 jō (c. 120 m) · kōji 4 jō · ōji 8–12 jō · Nijō 17 jō · Suzaku-ōji 28 jō (c. 84 m) · city 1,508 × 1,753 jō

Land in the capital by rank

Grant residential land in whole blocks and fractions of blocks according to rank: several blocks to the highest ministers, one or two to officials of high rank, and to ordinary households a half, a quarter or less, according to their size.

Minister of the Right 4 machi · high ranks 2 · middle ranks 1 · households 1, ½ or ¼ (691); in Heian-kyō, ordinary lots of 1/32 machi (c. 15 × 30 m)

Cite this page Chris Paton, “Japanese”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/style/japanese. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.