Vernacular Architecture

Machiya- A house form in Japan

Vernacular Architecture…

•Derived from the Latin word vernaculus, the term vernacular was first used in England in 1839, and later gained wider use in the 1950’s. Therefore, it is a rather new term meaning a local style in which the common houses are built.

•It is a phrase that has been used in a linguistic study to describe an indigenous idiom- a common speech.

•Paul Oliver explains, based on the linguistic use of the term, that vernacular architecture may be understood as “the common speech of building.”

•Bernard Rudolf sky's“Architecture without Architects”

the most commonfeatures of vernacular architecture include:

• Owner-built/ community-built• Utilization of traditional technologies• Strong relation to local environmental context• Materials from local resources• The embodiment of communityvalues- traditions and myths

Machiya ( 町 屋 / 町 家 ) are traditional wooden townhouses found throughout Japan and typified in the historical capital of Kyoto.• Machiya (townhouses) and noka (farm dwellings) constitute the two categories of

Japanese vernacular architecture known as minka (folk dwellings).• Machiya originated as early as the Heian period and continued to develop through to the Edo

period and even into the Meiji period. • Machiya housed urban merchants and craftsmen, a class collectively referred to

as chonin (townspeople). • The word machiya is written using two kanji : machi ( 町 ) meaning “town”, and ya ( 家 or 屋 )

meaning “house” ( 家 ) or “shop” ( 屋 ) depending on the kanji used to express it.

A typical Machiya…. • From the outside, machiya generally have a

similar appearance. They are all quite narrow, and it is often said that they are built in the “bed of eels” style, meaning that a great number of long and skinny houses lined along the road.

From first shops in the fledgling imperial capital one thousand years ago, machiya have evolved to the point where most follow the same general layout, • With the shop area in the rooms closest to the street and

living quarters towards the rear.

• Rooms are multi purpose, as in most traditional Japanese structures, with sliding partitions between areas rather than true walls,

• And a great deal of open space during the day when bedding is put away.

• From the late Edo-period onward, the floor of most rooms is comprised of tatami, thick woven straw mats of a standard size.

long and skinny houses lined along the road.

Old fabric shop in Nara

The typical elements….The distinctive facade of a machiya features a tile roof, exterior walls of scorched wood and vertical lattices of plaster, wood and bamboo that allow light and air into the house while maintaining privacy and security.

Planning• The family shop was in the

front of the machiya, in the room or rooms facing the street.

• The tatami-floored residential quarters open off a clay or stone path that runs from the front of the house to the back.

• One or two internal gardens bring light, air and greenery to the interior rooms.

The development down the eras…Jomon (10,00 bc – 300 bc)Yayoi (300 bc – 300 ad)Kofun (300 – 710)Asuka (593 – 710)Nara (710 – 794)Heian (794 – 1185)Kamakura (1185 – 1333)Muromachi (1333 – 1568)Azuchi-Momoyama (1568 – 1600)Edo (1600 – 1868)Meiji (1868 – 1912)Taisho (1912 – 1926)Showa (1926 – 1989)Heisei (1989 – present)

Remains from the Jomon Period of prehistoric Japan indicate that the earliest dwellings were generally pit-like shelters (tateana), supposedly covered by a simple system of posts and thatch.

Yayoi period show that structures with elevated, boarded, floors (takayuka) began to appear during that time.The raised floor became a sacred space, or aplace reserved for special functions ( i.e. sleeping, eating, storage of food and valuables).

The significance of the raised floor remains a critical aspect of Japanese residences to this day.

• Earlier all functions of living, sleeping, and eating were enclosed in the singular space of the pit dwelling.

• The introduction of the elevated floor led to the next major development, the definition of specific and non-specific function space.

• This of course goes hand in hand with the development of the roof as a singular element, raised off the ground, and distinguished from the wall, or shutter like enclosures between structural columns.

• At this point, the language of architectural elements gathered its basic vocabulary- column, beam, floor, wall, and roof- in Japan.

“In the Heian period, the bedroom was smaller than the dayroom, but in the Nara period or pre-Nara period buildings, the bedroom was larger. We might say that in the Hein period the pit-dwelling , which consisted entirely of an enclosed sleeping space, developed into the shinden (residential style) as the size of the sleeping area decreased.”

Over time, from even the age of the earliest takayuka (raisedfloor) structures, the families of Japanese craftsmen found thepractical logic of standardizing the sizing and placement ofmajor wooden structural members based upon modules andmultiplication of column sections.

The implementation and development of the standards are not as clear cut and purely derived as many foreign interpretations, but it may be safe to say that Japan did realize and refine a basic order of measure and process very early on, and such a pattern of construction was well established by the time of the 16th and 17th centuries in which the machiya form grew into aunique and significant feature of the built landscape.

The form….

The machiya has a close kinship to the rural minka pattern in that it typically includes an earthen floored area which flanks the living spaces.

• This dry packed ground entry and hall (doma or torinawa) ordinarily runs the length of the house from front (mote- street side) to back (ura- garden side).

The front room, was quite often used as the shop space, the mise-no-ma (miseshop;ma- room). The shop might be an actual place for labor(such as the maker of tatami mats), sale of goods (such as small ceramic wares or foods), or, quite often, a meeting place for middlemen merchants to receive clients and discuss business and trades over a hot cup of tea.

• In the earlier structures, the kitchen facilities(daidokoro) could be found within this hall passageway.

• From street to rear garden, the hall served not only as circulation space for the inhabitants but also as a duct for natural breezes to pass through the house.

• Therefore, the divisions of this hallway, if there need be any, was generally accomplished with the use of short hanging curtains (noren) that could be used to visually separate spaces without blocking the passage of sound and cooling winds.

• The middle room, or naka-no-ma behind the mise-no-ma was generally, as so often the case with ANY room within the common Japanese house, a multipurpose room for the family.

• Family dining might often take place here, but the fact that the low and simple furniture of the room could be moved and stored away allowed a great deal of flexibility in how the room might be used- for sleeping , studying, etc.

• Towards the rear of most machiya is a room called the zashiki, which served the function of receiving the most important guests or customers.

• During other times it was an area exclusively reserved for the head of the household.

• A zashiki often faces a garden designed solely for viewing from that room. Guests to the household never enter the garden, and it is designed in a very deliberate way to provide the strongest viewing from inside the zashiki.

On top of the kitchen there is a void called Hibukuro. It serves a chimney for cooking fumes.

• Bathing and toilet facilities were most often found as a semi-detached structure behind the main house.

• Like the kitchen facilities found in the earthen hallway, however, the improvement of modern supply and waste systems, as well as the changes made in household appliances have allowed increased flexibility in the location of these functions.

Second Floor

• The transition from one story (hiraya) to two story machiya structures is yet again a result of changes in political control.

• As strict controls from the Tokugawa era on the height of roof lines and the uses of second floor spaces changed or became eased, the machiya went from being a one story space, to one and a half, to what is now most commonly a two storey construction.

• As the space increased and the shop spaces became more common and successful, the second story went from being a place for storage to an extension of family living spaces. This might have been used to allow for increased demand for the lower floor to be maintained as a place of business and reception, or to house a growing, multigeneration family.

ConstructionThe building materials used in a Machiya are surprising in their simplicity. Stone is used only as a slab for the foundation and as stepping-stones in the exterior of the house. Apart from stone, the only real construction materials required to build a machiya are wood, clay, bamboo, and paper.

The system used for construction is skeleton and infill.• The construction of a house begins

with the creation of plans on a wooden board called an itazu.

• It lists little more than the placement of pillars and the amount of tatami mats in each room.

• As rooms are all sized to fit standard tatami mats, little else is needed for an experienced carpenter to raise a structure.

• The columns of the house are not tied to the foundation in any way, and are held in place by the weight of the structure.

• The walls of the machiya are not required to support any load except for their own.

• The roof consists of several large horizontal beams laid on top of the vertical beams of the foundation. The design of the roof allows for a completely open floor plan below, as it requires no additional load-bearing walls to be constructed.

The first step is the laying of the foundation and its construction is additionally far simpler as the only purpose of a machiya’s foundation is to raise the house above the ground. • Being its only purpose, the foundation is little

more than a flat stone sunk into the ground on which a vertical wooden beam rests.

• It additionally benefits the house by providing a means for air to circulate under the floor, important as Japanese summers are very humid, and were it not for air movement, materials inside the structure would quickly deteriorate.

The walls of the inside rooms are created from a mixture of sand, straw and clay laid over a bamboo lattice. It provides strong protection from the elements and creates a softer mood inside the house.

1. A tatami ( 畳 ) is a type of mat used as a flooring material in traditional Japnese style rooms. • Traditionally made of rice straw to form the core (though

nowadays sometimes the core is composed of compressed wood chip boards or poltstrene foam), with a covering of woven soft rush(igusa) straw, tatami are made in standard sizes, with the length exactly twice the width.

• Usually, on the long sides, they have edging (heri) of brocade or plain cloth, although some tatami have no edging.

Pieces and parts….

Men making tatami mats, late 19th century.

The term tatami is derived from the verb tatamu, meaning to fold or pile. This indicates that the early tatami were thin and could be folded up when not used or piled in layers. Tatami were originally a luxury item for the nobility. During the Heian period, the flooring of palatial rooms were mainly wooden, and tatami were only used as seating for the highest aristocrats.

This architectural style reached its peak of development in the Muromachi period, when tatami gradually came to be spread over whole rooms, beginning with small rooms. Rooms completely spread with tatami came to be known aszashiki (lit., room spread out for sitting), and rules concerning seating and etiquette determined the arrangement of the tatami in the rooms.It is said that prior to the mid-16th century, the ruling nobility and samurai slept on tatami or woven mats called goza, while commoners used straw mats or loose straw for bedding.

Tatami were gradually popularized and finally reached the homes of commoners toward the end of the 17th century.

2. Sliding panels of opaque paper covering a thin wooden frame,fusuma, are used as primary partition material of interiorspace. • The fusuma support only their own weight, and therefore

being rather light, are easily moved in or removed from the wooden tracks in which they lay.

• The tracks at the floor are generally rather shallow while the top track is deep enough to allow the panel to be lifted up and moved out of the track entirely.

• The panels almost never extend from floor to ceiling, but are instead only around 6’ in height.

Fusuma is composed of three parts :1 - The inside of the panel2 - The frames3 - The two surfaces

It is often found that a grill-like or paper coveredopening, or ramma, is inserted into the transom; or it mayeven serve as the entire transom structure. • The wooden grill allows for greater air circulation within the house. • The fusuma and ramma are both quite utilitarian in origin and use,

but often they are also used as a means of expression of status and taste.

• The heavy paper used to cover the fusuma screen could be given decorative patterns or used as a canvas for calligraphy or mural paintings.

• In the homes of the very wealthy and ruling classes, such screen paintings might be of great value, having been executed by highly respected artisans.

3. The third type of partition is the shoji, or paper covered screen. Unlike the fusuma, the paper covering on the shoji is found only on one side, leaving the wooden frame exposed.Also, the paper is generally semi-transparent allowing soft light to pass through. For this reason, the shoji panel is most often located at an exterior wall, or opposite the exterior edge of the verandah (engawa).

5. A common sight on the first story rooftop of a machiya is the Shoki-san, a small carved stone figure in order to ward off bad luck and guard against disease and bad spirits.

6. Windows on the first floor are usually protected from damage and intruders outside via a wooden lattice known as a koushi. The slats are arranged in such a way as to let the maximum amount of light inside while retaining a measure of protection on the outside and providing privacy for those inside. There are a variety of different designs, and often the styles are specific to a certain type of shop.

4. ‘Tansu' constructed as a freestanding staircase with storage drawers and compartments built into the steps , common in 'machiya' from the early Edo period onward. The staircase was conceived as a series of steps, whereby the space beneath the treads was utilised to provide storage in the form of cupboards or drawers and mostly a combination of both.

Climate control via openness and flexibility…

Japan is an island kingdom. • The land scape is rich in mountains and

forests with volca noes and earthquakes. • Settlement is concentrated in the lowland

towards the Pacific Ocean, with one of the world's highest population densities.

• The climate varies from cold temperate to tropical. Most of Japan is situated in the subtropical zone and has a mild, warm and humid climate. Spring and autumn are short, and the summer is long, warm and wet.

In the 14th century, a Japanese philosopher wrote: A house should be built with the summer in view. In winter one can live anywhere, but a poor dwelling in summer is unbearable.

The house is raised above the terrain in order to separate it from the moist ground and to ventilate the floor.

The roof's projection diverts the rain and screens out the summer sun but allows the low-angled winter sun access to the house.

The facade consists of a number of movable screens, creating comfort during changing conditions throughout the day and year. Curtains, blinds and paper panels impede the view but allow ventilation. Wooden shutters to close the house during the night are stored in an external cupboard during the day.

Based on the shell and core principle, the spaces in these homes can be used flexibly in a variety of different ways according to need.

a) the use of transformable furniture which encourages the multi-functional use of space by enabling one set of furniture to be folded away, as another is pulled out eg a fold-up bed goes away as a fold-down desk appears;

b) Non-function-specific spaces are designed that can accommodate domestic or non-domestic use; these functions can change over time;

c) Sliding doors are used to close off private areas when members of the public visit the home; when the building is in purely domestic use, these are opened, transforming the spaces;

d) In addition, spaces can be transformed from domestic to non-domestic by shutting away elements of a room, such as kitchen units, that make it specific to a particular function.

Flexibility

The Present….Machiya play a major role in defining the atmosphere and character of Kyoto, and they are disappearing rapidly. Thirteen percent of Kyoto’s machiya were destroyed between 1993 and 2003. Of those surviving, 80% have been altered in some major way, losing significant elements of their traditional facades; one in five have been almost completely altered, their wooden facades replaced with concrete and only the basic shape of the traditional structure has been maintained.

Unlike those machiya in very particular tourist-heavy areas or historically significant areas, which may benefit strongly from maintaining a traditional image, many machiya in Kyoto are simply used as houses, or as shops which, due to their location, goods, or other factors, could just as easily be operated out of more modern buildings.

Luckily, there are organizations working to protect and restore machiya.