#Japanese roof types series#

This warrior style ( bukke - zukuri) placed a number of rooms under one roof or a series of conjoined roofs and was surrounded by a defensive device such as a fence, wall or moat, with guard towers and gates. When the imperial court at Kyoto lost the reins of power to the military government of the shogunate, located far to the west in Kamakura, the open and vulnerable shinden style was supplanted by a type of residential building more easily defended. The layout of Kyoto's Old Imperial Palace is similar, though it is a replica of this style. The graceful shinden- zukuri style of this structure, utilised for the residences of Heian court nobles, is characterised by rectangular structures in symmetrical arrangement and linked by long corridors. The mutability of residence and temple held true in the subsequent Heian Period as well, as evidenced by the villa of the nobleman Fujiwara no Yorimichi (992AD-1074), which became the Phoenix Hall of Byodo-in, in Uji near Kyoto. The historical Horyu Ji at Nara: an incredible example of Japanese architecture. Both displayed red-lacquered columns and green roofs with pronounced upswinging curves in the eaves.

At this time, secular and sacred architecture were essentially the same, and palaces were often rededicated as temples. In the 7th century, at the capital in Nara, Chinese architectural influence became quite obvious, not only in the structures themselves, but in the adoption of the north-south grid plan of the streets, based on the layout of the Chinese capital. The foundations of the vast temple that was the prototype of Horyu-ji can be seen in Kyongju, South Korea. It is said that Korean builders came over to Japan and either built or supervised the building of the Horyu-ji (AD 607). The introduction of Buddhism to Japan in AD 552 brought with it a whole raft of cultural and technical features, not least of which was the continental style of architecture. Each rebuilding takes years to accomplish, starting with the cutting of special cypress trees deep in the mountains, and involves special carpentry techniques as well as time-honoured rituals. First completed in the 5th century, the shrines have been ritually rebuilt 60 times, every 20 years. The oldest Japanese dwellings are the pit houses of the Neolithic Jomon culture, but the oldest structures to which the term 'architecture' might be applied are the Grand Shrines of Ise. Whatever factors determined how buildings were constructed in Japan, survival, tradition, aesthetics, some common characteristics can be found that define the tradition of Japanese architecture. Its concepts of fluidity, modularity, making the most of limited space, and use of light and shadow have a great power and appeal, both aesthetically and as solutions to architectural problems in contemporary times. Nonetheless, Japanese architecture has influenced architectural design throughout the world.

Indeed, rather than wind, earth or water, it is fire that is the greatest destroyer of buildings in Japan, although few buildings could have withstood the type of tsunami the world witnessed on 11 March 2011 along the devastated Tohoku coastline.

The devastation of the 1995 Kobe earthquake suggests otherwise. The fact that Japan has the world's oldest wooden buildings (Horyu-ji, built about AD 607) and the world's largest wooden structure (at Todai-ji, some 50 metres/165ft high and said to have been rebuilt at only two-thirds its original size) suggests that the architectural system adopted by the Japanese was at least partially successful in creating structures that last.

How would one make a palace or temple or hall, a farmhouse or a gate to survive such destructive forces? These questions had to be faced by the designers of buildings in Japan's remote past and are still faced today. What kind of house would one build in Japan if one knew it might be blown apart in a natural disaster? Besides typhoons and earthquakes, Japan also has severe rains, which often cause flooding and landslides.