Furniture Design Ideas

Japanese gardens do not exist as independent entities. Until the Edo period, they were generally designed to be viewed from a seated position in the building interior, and so were directly correlated to the function and style of the architecture. There are no other known examples of this kind of correlation; it is apparently unique […]

The term “yd” appears repeatedly throughout the text of Sakuteiki, referring to stylized forms in which each of the six compositional elements can be rendered to express “the natural landscape.” “Yd” has a broad range of nuances and is used in Sakuteiki to indicate form or shape (sometimes also indicated by the term “kata”), definitive […]

The prototype of garden design is described in the open­ing paragraphs of Sakuteiki, while the remainder of the text presents the Japanese garden’s six basic composition­al elements—the artificial hills, the pond, the island, the white sand south garden, the garden stream, and the waterfall—and also notes that plants and springs may be used as garden […]

Shinden-zukuri gardens, which were integrally linked to the structure and composition of the corresponding archi­tecture, developed with as much variety as did palatial buildings in the same style. Like palace architecture, gar­dens too had requisite prototypes. The opening line of Sakuteiki in fact refers to the inextricable correlation between prototype and interpretation: In making the […]

Given the limited space available on the east-west axis of a one-chd site, it was probably not possible to execute the formal arrangement on the north-south axis either. Two different approaches were employed as means of adapting buildings to sites that were limited in size: Scale Reduction This method involves reducing the size of all […]

Higashisanjo Palace, for generations home to the power­ful aristocratic Fujiwara family, was a representative piece of Heian-period residential architecture. Yet even this classic palace lacked many of the requisite components that defined shinden-zukuri. The palace had no west tai­noya proper. The east chUmon served as the main entrance and the east fishing pavilion was omitted. […]

“As a rule, a one-cho site contains east and west tai and east and west chUmon.” According to this excerpt from ChUyUki, the diary of Heian-period courtier Fujiwara no Munetada (1062-1141), the shinden-zukuri style for a one-cho site has a central shinden hall, with east and west tainoya opposing annexes and chUmon corridors with inner […]

The two Japanese cities that were built in a space and cli­mate vastly different from China’s, at approximately “one – quarter the scale of Changan, should probably be called scale-reduction models. The main avenues of Heijo-kyo measured 85 meters [279 feet] in width, in comparison to Changan’s, which were 150 meters [492 feet] … Japan’s […]

M ount Miwa in Yamato (present-day Nara Prefec­ture) is a sacred mountain, thought to be manifest­ed spirit according to the indigenous animistic religious beliefs of Shinto. Pre-Nara-period Shinto (pre-645) focused on nature worship in sacred sites—roped-off clearings surrounding unusually-shaped mountains, trees, rocks, waterfalls and other natural phenomena. The present Omiwa Shrine at the base of […]

I have been studying traditional Japanese dwellings (minka) since 1962, particularly in the Kansai, Chubu, and Tohoku regions, and have continued to follow the transformations in these homes with great interest over the years. My motivation was very simple—I was interest­ed in the question of why these buildings had survived in Japan. Were minka the […]