Works and Woods
Architecture and ecology in Japanby Paul Gleason

Wempty, the venerable house contains its own history. “The interesting thing about a townhouse likethis,” Lippit says, “is it stands at the intersection ofalmost every kind of architecture you can imagine.”
By focusing on the pillars and walls of the merchant’s house (an example of the kyo-machiya style),
Lippit is trying to understand Japanese buildings
in a new context. “There is a way of narrating thehistory of Japanese architecture as changes instyle,” he says. “That’s not to be dismissed.” But
Lippit believes he can also approach the country’s
architectural past in terms of the archipelago’secology, most notably its history of deforestation.
To do so, he studies both what he calls Japan’s “culture of building” and its “human-forest relationship.” The former, already evident in sixth-century
architecture, refers to what materials builders usedand how they procured and fashioned them. The
latter, appearing more clearly in the early modern
architecture of the sixteenth century, refers towhat the builders’ choices said about how they saw
their environment and themselves. “I don’t thinkit’s a matter of choosing one paradigm or theother,” he cautions. “But I think that the ecologicalframework really needs to be considered.” In his research and teaching, his new approach to natural materials andthe built world has begun to blossom.
If past generations of scholars have taken the ecological side ofarchitecture for granted, Lippit says, this is partly because historical data, on both forests and the buildings they become, havebeen scarce. Master carpenters in Japan have rebuilt important
temples and homes for centuries with particular attention tousing the same woods and styles, but until a few decades ago,these restorations went largely undocumented. New restorations, with complete documentation, allow historians to determine what wood was used, how it was ﬁtted together, and even
where it originated. Dendrochronological analyses, placing asample of wood under a microscope, can date a building evenmore exactly, says Lippit. “I don’t think we had the same tools at
our disposal even 10 or 15 years ago.”
Fifteen years ago, Lippit wasn’t studying Japanese architecture
at all. After growing up in Tokyo and in Riverside, California,
near Los Angeles, he came to Harvard and concentrated in literature. He then won a two-year traveling fellowship, which hespent working at the Guimet in Paris, a museum famous for its
Asian holdings. A newfound passion for Japanese art led him toPrinceton, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2003, specializing in premodern painting. The path to temples was actually a short one.

ULANA SWITUCHA / ALAMYJOCHEN SCHLENKER/MASTERFILEhen you enter the Japanese house in the
Boston Children’s Museum, says Yukio Lippit’92, “you feel a little bit Alice in Wonderland-ish.”
Stepping into this nineteenth-century Kyoto
merchant’s house does feel like going down therabbit hole. The color and clutter of the neighboring exhibits disappear. Aside from tatami mats on the ﬂoor
and a low table, the house appears empty.
But Lippit, who is Weston associate professor in the humanities, sees more. In the timber frame, taken apart in Kyoto and rebuilt on the third ﬂoor of the museum during 1979 and 1980, hepoints out the same sort of joinery that holds up thousand-yearold temples and majestic castles. In an alcove made of nearly adozen kinds of wood, he ﬁnds in the interplay of wood grains a
subtle decoration that draws the viewer’s attention. Far from44

Se ptember - October 200 8“Architecture and painting,” he explains, “are actually closely related in the Japanese context”: for instance, aristocrats not only
displayed artwork in their homes, they also turned the mansions
themselves into works of art with paintings on walls and slidingdoors.

After receiving his doctorate(and a position at Harvard in thesame year), Lippit decided to teach architectural history. “Considering, as I do, that it’s one of the most remarkable architectural
traditions imaginable,” he says, “premodern Japanese architecture
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GARY CROSS/DORLING KINDERSLEY RF/GETTY IMAGES

663HIGHLANDAMANA IMAGES INC./ ALAMY

Left: A grove of cypress trees prepared for harvest. Above, left: Built in 607, Horyuji monastery is Japan’s
oldest surviving example of monumental timber-frame architecture. Its five-story pagoda (top) enshrines relicsof the Buddha. The pagoda’s main structural element, pictured in the cutaway (right), is its heart pillar, a single
cypress tree that keeps the building steady during earthquakes. Above, right: More cypress pillars hold up themonastery’s outer ring and main hall.

©CHRISTOPHE BOISVIEUX/CORBIS

Most of the Todaiji complex has disappeared, lostto natural disaster and civil war. When originallybuilt, the Great Buddha Hall (above, as restored
in the seventeenth century) rested on 48 structural pillars, each 30 meters tall and 1.5 meters wide.
According to William Coaldrake’s The Way of theCarpenter, the project “employed 227 site supervisors, 917 master builders, and 1,438 laborers. Atpeak periods over 1,000 cooks prepared meals for thedifferent craftsmen and laborers at the site.” The Great
Buddha itself (left) sits inside the hall. In order to castit, bronze workers used about 163,000 cubic feet ofcharcoal—also derived from wood.

KOICHI KAMOSHIDA/GETTY IMAGES

architecture and ecology, a relationship that goesback more than a thousand years.

has been dramatically under-studied.” Drawing on scholarly
work by Conrad Totman, Ph.D. ’64 (an emeritus professor at Yale
who has written a history of Japanese forestry), and William
Coaldrake, Ph.D. ’83 (the head of Japanese studies at the University of Melbourne, and a carpenter), Lippit designed a course thatexplores, among other topics, the intertwined history of Japan’s
46Se ptember - October 200 8Japan’s culture of building changed rapidly inthe early sixth century, when Korean craftsmen
brought the secrets of monumental timber-frame
engineering across the Sea of Japan. Local carpenters already relied on elaborate wooden joints,
rather than nails, to hold buildings together, but
the Koreans taught them how to support enormous
structures with heavy tile roofs (like the one on themerchant’s house) by funneling the buildings’
weight through brackets and sturdy foundationalpillars. Suddenly, those Japanese master carpenters
who practiced the Korean techniques could build
on a previously unimaginable scale.
Their tree of choice was Japanese cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa).
Growing up to 40 meters tall, these trees initially covered much ofthe archipelago. “Cypress from very early on was recognized as asuperior building material for timber-frame structures,” Lippit explains. A cypress tree’s straight, tight grain makes it resistant toJOCHEN SCHLENKER/MASTERFILE

Harvard Magazine

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DARBY SAWCHUK/ALAMY©MICHAEL S.YAMASHITA/ CORBIS

rot and easy for carpenters using Top: Himeji, known as the “White Heron,” is one of thehand wedges to split into long finest early modern Japanese castles still standing. Theplaster walls that hide its wooden structure—thebeams. Cypress also has a rich, whitemain building, or keep, has not one but two heart pillars
creamy color and a scent that he de- —protected its interior (above) from gunfire, a relatively
scribes as “very faint natural wood recent innovation in Japanese warfare. The undersides ofincense, with even a touch of euca- the sweeping eaves (right) show the complex joinery typical of the period. To build castle foundations, architects
lyptus.”had to cut down forests to get at the rocks beneath.
Its structural and aesthetic qual- “The stone you see here consumed more wood than theities impressed the ruling elite, wooden structure on top,” says Yukio Lippit. “Despite thewho lived in the Kinai basin (home heroism, the grandeur” of Himeji, he adds, this represented “a moment of crisis in the human-forest relationship.”of modern-day Kyoto and Osaka).
basin. Cypress was plentiful, and the pace of building only inThese powerful clan leaders hired master carpenters to build
creased. “There was a national campaign in the eighth century topalaces and sponsored the construction of Shinto shrines andbuild temples in every province in Japan under imperial control,”
Buddhist temples—one of which, Horyuji, still stands. By thesays Lippit. Although exact historical ﬁgures are elusive, the lateyear 628, dozens of Buddhist monasteries already dotted theGLOW IMAGES/ALAMY

Japanese historian Tokoro Mitsuo estimated that, between 600
and 850, monasteries alone used some three million cubic metersof wood. And this monumental construction, Lippit notes, represented only a fraction of the wood that nobles and commoners
were using for their fuel and homes. As Kinai’s old-growthforests were disappearing, carpenters had to push farther andfarther up into the surrounding mountains to ﬁnd the cypress
their patrons craved.
In the case of the imperial monastery Todaiji, architectural aspiration confronted ecological reality. When it was ﬁrst built inthe 740s, Todaiji included two nine-story pagodas and a greathall 50 meters tall and 86 meters wide. The temple required 84
major cypress pillars and used up at least 2,200 acres of forest. It
burned down during a battle in 1180, and a monk named Shunjobo Chogen set out on a quest to rebuild it, soliciting contributions from all over western Japan. His work crews had to travel,
too, trekking hundreds of kilometers from the Kinai basin in
search of untouched groves.
In The Green Archipelago, Conrad Totman describes the Herculean labor of ﬁnding and transporting suitable cypress. The
group of trees they ﬁnally chose “was well past its prime,” hewrites. “But logging crews commenced felling anyway. Many ofthe trees were found to be hollow, knotty, or untrue, and workmen had to fell several hundred to obtain the few score requiredfor pillars.” They then leveled a valley in order to winch the cypress to a river that turned out to be too shallow for the logs toﬂoat in, so they constructed a network of 118 dams to raise the48

Se ptember - October 200 8

water level and ferry their wood to the Inland Sea, where they
had to contend with local pirates. All this, Totman reiterates,
was just for the pillars. The rest of the wood came from at least
10 di≠erent provinces. “Reconstruction was completed during
the 1190s,” Totman notes, “but it still yielded a main hall only halfas spacious as the original.” The old culture of monumentalbuilding, so reliant on a single material, was “proving di∞cult tomaintain.”

During japan’s medieval period (1050 to 1550), the scarcityof high-quality wood forced carpenters to adapt. Around 1300,
deforestation spurred the invention of new tools. “Radicalchanges were precipitated by the medieval equivalent of themodern-day energy crisis,” writes William Coaldrake in The Wayof the Carpenter. “The Japanese began to run out of straightgrained timber of structural dimensions.” Carpenters designed
new tools to handle red pine and zelkova. They borrowed technology from those who forged samurai swords, adding a steel
coating to formerly iron tools. The ﬂexibility of the steel madethe tools especially responsive, like “an extension of the wrist,”says Lippit. “You could wield them like a brush.” The steel could“cypress-ize” unruly wood to some extent, but more joints werenecessary to connect smaller pieces of timber, a change evident
in the appearance of medieval buildings.
Although master carpenters still could and did build large timber-frame structures, political power in the medieval period was
too dispersed among quarreling warlords to sustain a national

WERNER FORMAN/CORBIS

building program. But in the early modern era, which began inthe late 1500s, the upstart general Toyotomi Hideyoshi brought
the warring factions to heel. The rulers of Kinai had never been

TIBOR BOGNAR/ALAMYRAPHAEL AZEVEDO FRANCABILL BACHMAN / ALAMY

In the 1930s, the architect Bruno Taut proclaimed the seventeenth-century Katsura Villaa modernist ideal: it connected inside and outside (opposite page), had free-flowing
spaces and modular rooms (top), and was, above all, austere. Lippit agrees with muchof Taut’s assessment, but thinks he missed Katsura’s smaller decorative touches.
According to a recent conservation report, the villa’s original builders put the structure
together using 49 different kinds of wood, choreographing the different grains into
pleasing patterns (above and right). The conservation report also found that a special
dyeing process had accentuated the contrasting grains, and that some of the wood had
not, in fact, been procured by local woodcutters, but had come from quite far away.
Far from being austere, the entire villa invites attention to its minutest detail.
“Ironically,” Lippit points out, “it’s subverting its own rusticity.”

able to extend their reach much beyond the basin,
but Hideyoshi, by unifying Japan, had the resources of the entire archipelago within his grasp and could
gather cypress and other rare trees from its remotest corners.
By the time Hideyoshi came to power, the golden age of JapanHarvard Magazine49

In the Japanese merchant house at theBoston Children’s Museum, Lippit points
out different wood types in the tokonoma
alcove (top right). A master carpenter’s
tools (right) are also part of the exhibit.

JIM HARRISON

ese castle construction had alreadybegun, and with it came rapid urbanization. Formerly, castles had been little
more than fortresses perched on mountaintops. The new castle was more administrative palace than inaccessible
fortress. Although these palaces requireda staggering amount of timber (in somecases around 2,000 acres’ worth), the real
ecological damage came elsewhere. “Thereason why castles are associated with forestry predation,” explains Lippit, “is that they’re at the centers of large, sprawling
cities made out of wood.” Tokugawa Ieyasu, Hideyoshi’s successor,
oversaw roughly 260 domains, each with a warlord who wanted acastle of his own. “It’s probably safe to say that right around the
mid seventeenth century was a real low point in this larger manforest relationship,” says Lippit.
While castle towns were putting unprecedented pressure on
Japanese forests, a new architectural style emerged. Sukiya architecture, inﬂuenced by the sixteenth-century tea ceremony, imagined the human-forest relationship very di≠erently. Previously,that relationship had been largely utilitarian (the right wood forthe right job). But in sukiya, wood was chosen not only for its
structural properties, but also for its ability to communicate certain values important to the tea ceremony: rusticity, imperfection, and humility. “During Japan’s medieval period,” says Lippit,“there emerged among the elite an ideal of rusticity and reclusion, one that was strongly influenced by Buddhist thought aswell. Those who embraced this ideal usually imagined a rustic
habitat to be the perfect antithesis to their monastic, aristocratic, or other urban obligations.” Where elite architecture had
prized straight grains, smooth surfaces, and uniformity, sukiya
brought to the fore tangled grains, hollows and knots (unthinkable in o∞cial buildings), and the use of as many di≠erent kindsof wood as possible.
Sukiya architecture, in theory, reﬂected the availability of localwood. The more the building put its occupant in mind of the50

Se ptember - October 200 8humble woodcutter’s
makeshift hut, the better. “The single-mindedfocus on certain species”
like cypress was much
more potentially harmful
ecologically than the useof a variety of di≠erent
types of trees that sukiya
called for, Lippit says.
Using di≠erent types ofwood promoted selective
cutting, for example, whereas loggers often used clearcutting to obtain cypress. (Although regenerative
forestry practices in the 1800s saved the archipelago
from ecological disaster, Japanese builders still deal
with shortages. Cypress, in particular, remains rare,
and often has to be imported from Taiwan.)
Sukiya also changed forestry practices. Certain horticultural tricks, such as clipping a tree’s branches years
before cutting it down, could yield knottier wood. In oneof the highest forms of teahouse aesthetic, the log thatmarked the boundary between a formal reception roomand the tokonoma alcove, where the occupant knelt towrite or pray, would have precisely three knots: it wasperfectly imperfect. “I don’t know if it’s bringing man
and nature together,” says Lippit, “but it’s deﬁnitely
bringing man and the way he imagines the wilderness
together.”
Despite its insistence on humility, sukiya was an elite
form of architecture, best exempliﬁed by the luxurious
Katsura Villa outside Kyoto. Built for friends of the imperial family in the early seventeenth century, the villa is a series ofmodular rooms that open onto lush gardens. Inside, the variety ofmismatched wood di≠ers markedly from the creamy walls of cypress temples. (Some pieces are still covered in bark.) By employing
these imperfections, the villa’s owners depicted the humble rusticity
they wanted to ascribe to themselves.
Not only aristocrats wanted to imagine themselves this way. Sukiya proved readily portable,and city-dwellers, who couldn’t a≠ord country Visit harvardmag.estates, incorporated its elements into their com/extras to watch
a film clip showing
homes. “By the nineteenth century,” Lippit notes, the reconstruction of“you can have your country living in your town- the Boston Children’shouse, with your garden and your sukiya e≠ects.” Museum’s Japanesehouse.
The merchant’s house at the Boston Children’sMuseum, on closer inspection, is full of sukiya touches within its
timber frame. In its own tokonoma alcove, tucked in a cornernear the back of the house, Lippit found no fewer than 10 typesof wood. The pine pillar separating the alcove and a small shrine,with its knots and cutaways (places where a carpenter deliberately chipped the wood to vary its appearance) is at once structural and decorative. He can trace the legacy of both ancient andearly-modern architecture on every wall panel and wooden
beam. Considered one at a time, these pieces add up to a complete history. “You can really only understand a Japanese building,” he says, “by taking it apart.”
Paul Gleason is sta≠ writer at this magazine.