Wood Scenery — Villa Katsura

The sensibility we miss when we standardise the production process

8 min readDec 30, 2020

This is a series of articles about the depth of design, the philosophy of wabi-sabi and an elergy for the lost sensibility from the age of traditional craftsmanship. It is by no means an attack on the standardized production of goods and products in the modern world. It serves as a reminder and inspiration for the future.

Villa Katsura and the philosophy of Wabi-Sabi

Inspired by the Japanese wood industry, I start to look for an example that embodies the poetics of wood in a unified manner. After some case studies, I am intrigued by spacial quality and the aesthetics of imperial villa of Katsura. Bruno Taut and other modernist architect were interested in its asymmetrical positive and negative form, its standardisation, flexibility, modulation system and grid structure. Despite all the modern spacial and principle it embodied however, it is a symbol of Japanese culture.To study Katsura, I want to not only study its layout and materialisation, but also how it conveys and expresses the Japanese philosophy. From the photos made by Ishimoto Yasuhiro in 1953 (image 11), we can see that the philosophy of Wabi-Sabi finding its expression in various parts of the building. From the bleak texture of the barked posts to the asymmetrical railing of the music suite, Katsura villa is a symphony of roughness and refinement, of the muted and subtle beauty. It is a symbol of humble grace.

Wabi-Sabi and its root in Chinese paintings

The word Wabi-Sabi consists of two notions in Japanese.Wabi(侘) means poverty but a genteel poverty that is found in farmhouses where the family enjoys the riches of conversations and connection while eating simple food from a simple hearth; Sabi(寂) described the muted and subtle beauty of 12th- 13th century poetry with its autumnal feel and somber mood.Wabi-Sabi is the philosophy of not following the masses. It is poor in wealth, power or fame but asks for the existence of higher values that transcends time and social status. It is a philosophy of feeling content with simple deeds. It appreciates the value of the lacking. The lack of decorations emphases the fundamentals of an object or a narrative. The lacking also indices imagination and evoke a sentiment in the atmosphere. Wabi-Sabi was inspired by Zen philosophy and developed through various art forms. Paintings around that period also share the same appreciation, described in D.T. Suzuki’s book Zen and Japanese culture. Ma Yuan’s Fishing Alone on a Cold River (image 9) made a contrast to extravagant ships battling on the vast Yang-Zi River. It shows the force of nature through a single fishing boat. Only several lines to indicate the boat. No depiction of water. But the scale of nature is potently revealed. Another piece is Mu Xi’s BaBa bird (image 10). It reduced the nature into one bird and one trunk. It expresses the Zen idea of knowing the autumn through one fallen leaf, seeing the world through one sand. A motive for self reflection is induced in the atmosphere of the lacking.

Wood scenery in Katsura

Instead of pursuing the abundance and varieties, Japanese culture values the fundamentals shown in the most primitive way of living and organising life.Villa Katsura was born under this influence. It was built by the Hachijo family in Japan during a time span of 50 years in the middle of the seventeenth century. The transient look expressed by various ways of wood application makes a big contrast to its existence for over 400 years. By exploring the tectonic potential of wood through this case study, I want to unveil how heterogeneity plays an important role in the architectural design of timber buildings. It shines light to design with materials that age beautifully and provide a better way to bridge the gap between design disciplines and material science of wood.

The layout of Katsura Villa adopted the flying geese formation (image 12). It consists of five major complex. Each complex has a L-shaped corridor along the outside of the building and a set of gridded spaces behind the corridor. All the service space are hidden behind the main ones and service routing separate from the main routing.The variety of spacial arrangement came from the fact that, unlike Chinese traditional architecture in which space is only connected in two opposite directions, Japanese traditional space connects four spaces from all sides. It resulted in a complicated layered spacial system and a high degree of flexibility. The layering of spaces post a question to how the light comes in for each room. Katsura villa is a skeleton timber structure.The bays of the load- bearing structure can be filled with clay or boards.The moving elements are made of sliding doors with translucent or non-translucent paper cladding. In the Old- Shoin, the sliding doors between the four rooms are all embossed with a great paulownia crest. Passing through its spaces there are black-lacquered edges of the sliding doors and dark colours of old posts and lintels.These horizontal and vertical lines partition up the space into its three dimensions.A sense of infinity is evoked in a small set of space.The spacial impression changes greatly in the new Goten. Lighting is realised by layered translucent lattices of the transoms. It flows into the interior in a soft and tranquil manner. Some certain shelves and parts of the floor remain a dark and static quality.

The main structure of Katsura consists of 120mmx120mm square-section pinewood posts and beams. But a lot of the posts in Katsura is barked and rounded. In some space however, round trunks with or without bark are used. Chu-shoi has a totally different atmosphere than the Old-shoi. In order to fully express the natural beauty of wood, trunks were applied with special surface treatment. Beams along the corridor above the posts are made from Chinese fir. dough timber Others are made from pinewood.Window frames and door frames are made of maple wood. The method to keep the bark and enhance its texture acts as a gesture of threshold. Crooked trunks were used for both the beam and posts in the structural frame of Shoin-Tei tea house (image 13). The trunk’s original body gesture was kept as much as possible. The appreciation of tree body gesture originated in Japanese art Bonsai.

Japanese Bonsai master Kunio Kobayashi stated in an interview, in the art of Bonsai (image 14), or the art of living tree, the true beauty comes not from the external look but from the lines. Lines that makes the tree more interesting and beautiful. Depending on the form of the lines, we can see and feel a sense of the severity of nature. It captures the harshness of the natural environment. Bonsai is a living thing, so they are never finished.They constantly change. His artistic approach is to constantly consider how best to bring out the beauty of the natural lines in a tree. In this way, it will inspire a feeling of great respect for nature when people look at it. When ceremony is performed in the tea house, the trunk reminds visitors of how time passes and left its trace and what nature offers.

The god is in the detail

The detail of the landing of the building is another example of expression of Wabi-Sabi. Japanese building technique set its basis largely on ancient Chinese wooden structures. However it evolved from its base and arrived in completely new tectonics of a building. (image 15)

Chinese stone base for wooden columns consists of a polished stone on top of which a wooden column is placed and connected with a dowel detail. It is a easy technique. Shifts of columns are avoided because of the connection. But in the moment of an earthquake, energy is conducted through this connection which makes an earthquake more destructive. Japanese style (Hikaridzuke: shaping the bottom of the wood according to the curves and shape of the base stone, image 16) uses natural stone (rough surface texture) as the base for a column to make the building more enduring during earthquake.

At the moment of an earthquake, the column would return to its original position after a slight shift.The roughness of the stone surface also absorbs the energy from a earthquake.This complicated technique is developed to adapt building in a earthquake-prone environment, but it resulted in a very different look of the posts and its base stones.

Along the outdoor corridor on the ground floor of the Old-Shoin (image 17), a row of columns rest on irregular-shaped natural stones. It blends the hard line of artificial and natural world. It embodies the spirit of abandoning the direct approach of human control and follows the rules of the nature.

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