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When you enter the Japanese house in theBoston Children’s Museum, says Yukio Lippit’92, “you feel a little bit Alice in Wonderland-ish.”Stepping into this nineteenth-century Kyotomerchant’s house does feel like going down therabbit hole. The color and clutter of the neigh-

boring exhibits disappear. Aside from tatami mats on the floorand a low table, the house appears empty.

But Lippit, who is Weston associate professor in the humani-ties, sees more. In the timber frame, taken apart in Kyoto and re-built on the third floor of the museum during 1979 and 1980, hepoints out the same sort of joinery that holds up thousand-year-old temples and majestic castles. In an alcove made of nearly adozen kinds of wood, he finds in the interplay of wood grains asubtle decoration that draws the viewer’s attention. Far from

empty, the venerable house contains its own his-tory. “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 mer-chant’s house (an example of the kyo-machiya style),Lippit is trying to understand Japanese buildingsin a new context. “There is a way of narrating thehistory of Japanese architecture as changes instyle,” he says. “That’s not to be dismissed.” ButLippit believes he can also approach the country’sarchitectural past in terms of the archipelago’secology, most notably its history of deforestation.To do so, he studies both what he calls Japan’s “cul-ture of building” and its “human-forest relation-ship.” The former, already evident in sixth-centuryarchitecture, refers to what materials builders usedand how they procured and fashioned them. Thelatter, appearing more clearly in the early modernarchitecture of the sixteenth century, refers towhat the builders’ choices said about how they sawtheir 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 re-search 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 his-torical data, on both forests and the buildings they become, havebeen scarce. Master carpenters in Japan have rebuilt importanttemples 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 restora-tions, with complete documentation, allow historians to deter-mine what wood was used, how it was fitted together, and evenwhere 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 atour disposal even 10 or 15 years ago.”

Fifteen years ago, Lippit wasn’t studying Japanese architectureat all. After growing up in Tokyo and in Riverside, California,near Los Angeles, he came to Harvard and concentrated in litera-ture. He then won a two-year traveling fellowship, which hespent working at the Guimet in Paris, a museum famous for itsAsian holdings. A newfound passion for Japanese art led him toPrinceton, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2003, specializing in pre-modern painting. The path to temples was actually a short one.

Works and Woods Architecture and ecology in Japan

by Paul Gleason

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Harvard Magazine 45

“Architecture and painting,” he explains, “are actually closely re-lated in the Japanese context”: for instance, aristocrats not onlydisplayed artwork in their homes, they also turned the mansionsthemselves into works of art with paintings on walls and sliding doors.

After receiving his doctorate(and a position at Harvard in thesame year), Lippit decided to teach architectural history. “Con-sidering, as I do, that it’s one of the most remarkable architecturaltraditions imaginable,” he says, “premodern Japanese architecture

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 singlecypress tree that keeps the building steady during earthquakes. Above, right: More cypress pillars hold up themonastery’s outer ring and main hall.

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46 September - October 2008

has been dramatically under-studied.” Drawing on scholarlywork by Conrad Totman, Ph.D. ’64 (an emeritus professor at Yalewho has written a history of Japanese forestry), and WilliamCoaldrake, Ph.D. ’83 (the head of Japanese studies at the Univer-sity of Melbourne, and a carpenter), Lippit designed a course thatexplores, among other topics, the intertwined history of Japan’s

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

Japan’s culture of building changed rapidly inthe early sixth century, when Korean craftsmenbrought the secrets of monumental timber-frameengineering across the Sea of Japan. Local carpen-ters already relied on elaborate wooden joints,rather than nails, to hold buildings together, butthe Koreans taught them how to support enormousstructures 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 carpenterswho 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 ex-plains. A cypress tree’s straight, tight grain makes it resistant to

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

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rot and easy for carpenters usinghand wedges to split into longbeams. Cypress also has a rich,creamy color and a scent that he de-scribes as “very faint natural woodincense, with even a touch of euca-lyptus.”

Its structural and aesthetic qual-ities impressed the ruling elite,who lived in the Kinai basin (homeof modern-day Kyoto and Osaka).These powerful clan leaders hired master carpenters to buildpalaces and sponsored the construction of Shinto shrines andBuddhist temples—one of which, Horyuji, still stands. By theyear 628, dozens of Buddhist monasteries already dotted the

basin. Cypress was plentiful, and the pace of building only in-creased. “There was a national campaign in the eighth century tobuild temples in every province in Japan under imperial control,”says Lippit. Although exact historical figures are elusive, the late

Top: Himeji, known as the “White Heron,” is one of thefinest early modern Japanese castles still standing. Thewhite plaster walls that hide its wooden structure—themain building, or keep, has not one but two heart pillars—protected its interior (above) from gunfire, a relativelyrecent innovation in Japanese warfare. The undersides ofthe sweeping eaves (right) show the complex joinery typi-cal of the period. To build castle foundations, architectshad to cut down forests to get at the rocks beneath. “The stone you see here consumed more wood than thewooden structure on top,” says Yukio Lippit. “Despite theheroism, the grandeur” of Himeji, he adds, this represent-ed “a moment of crisis in the human-forest relationship.”

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Japanese historian Tokoro Mitsuo estimated that, between 600and 850, monasteries alone used some three million cubic metersof wood. And this monumental construction, Lippit notes, rep-resented only a fraction of the wood that nobles and commonerswere 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 cypresstheir patrons craved.

In the case of the imperial monastery Todaiji, architectural as-piration 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 84major cypress pillars and used up at least 2,200 acres of forest. Itburned down during a battle in 1180, and a monk named Shun-jobo Chogen set out on a quest to rebuild it, soliciting contribu-tions from all over western Japan. His work crews had to travel,too, trekking hundreds of kilometers from the Kinai basin insearch of untouched groves.

In The Green Archipelago, Conrad Totman describes the Her-culean labor of finding and transporting suitable cypress. Thegroup 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 work-men had to fell several hundred to obtain the few score requiredfor pillars.” They then leveled a valley in order to winch the cy-press 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 the

water level and ferry their wood to the Inland Sea, where theyhad to contend with local pirates. All this, Totman reiterates,was just for the pillars. The rest of the wood came from at least10 di≠erent provinces. “Reconstruction was completed duringthe 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 straight-grained timber of structural dimensions.” Carpenters designednew tools to handle red pine and zelkova. They borrowed tech-nology from those who forged samurai swords, adding a steelcoating 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 evidentin the appearance of medieval buildings.

Although master carpenters still could and did build large tim-ber-frame structures, political power in the medieval period wastoo dispersed among quarreling warlords to sustain a national

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

able to extend their reach much beyond the basin,but Hideyoshi, by unifying Japan, had the re-

sources of the entire archipelago within his grasp and couldgather cypress and other rare trees from its remotest corners.

By the time Hideyoshi came to power, the golden age of Japan-

In the 1930s, the architect Bruno Taut proclaimed the seventeenth-century Katsura Villaa modernist ideal: it connected inside and outside (opposite page), had free-flowingspaces and modular rooms (top), and was, above all, austere. Lippit agrees with much of 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 structuretogether using 49 different kinds of wood, choreographing the different grains into pleasing patterns (above and right). The conservation report also found that a specialdyeing process had accentuated the contrasting grains, and that some of the wood hadnot, 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.”

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ese castle construction had alreadybegun, and with it came rapid urbaniza-tion. Formerly, castles had been littlemore than fortresses perched on moun-taintops. The new castle was more ad-ministrative palace than inaccessiblefortress. Although these palaces requireda staggering amount of timber (in somecases around 2,000 acres’ worth), the realecological damage came elsewhere. “Thereason why castles are associated with forestry predation,” ex-plains Lippit, “is that they’re at the centers of large, sprawlingcities 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 themid seventeenth century was a real low point in this larger man-forest relationship,” says Lippit.

While castle towns were putting unprecedented pressure onJapanese forests, a new architectural style emerged. Sukiya archi-tecture, influenced by the sixteenth-century tea ceremony, imag-ined 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 itsstructural properties, but also for its ability to communicate cer-tain values important to the tea ceremony: rusticity, imperfec-tion, and humility. “During Japan’s medieval period,” says Lippit,“there emerged among the elite an ideal of rusticity and reclu-sion, one that was strongly influenced by Buddhist thought aswell. Those who embraced this ideal usually imagined a rustichabitat to be the perfect antithesis to their monastic, aristo-cratic, or other urban obligations.” Where elite architecture hadprized straight grains, smooth surfaces, and uniformity, sukiyabrought to the fore tangled grains, hollows and knots (unthink-able 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 the

humble woodcutter ’smakeshift hut, the bet-ter. “The single-mindedfocus on certain species”like cypress was muchmore potentially harmfulecologically than the useof a variety of di≠erenttypes of trees that sukiyacalled for, Lippit says.Using di≠erent types ofwood promoted selective

cutting, for example, whereas loggers often used clear-cutting to obtain cypress. (Although regenerativeforestry practices in the 1800s saved the archipelagofrom ecological disaster, Japanese builders still dealwith shortages. Cypress, in particular, remains rare,and often has to be imported from Taiwan.)

Sukiya also changed forestry practices. Certain horti-cultural tricks, such as clipping a tree’s branches yearsbefore 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 manand nature together,” says Lippit, “but it’s definitelybringing man and the way he imagines the wildernesstogether.”

Despite its insistence on humility, sukiya was an eliteform of architecture, best exemplified by the luxuriousKatsura Villa outside Kyoto. Built for friends of the imper-

ial 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 cy-press temples. (Some pieces are still covered in bark.) By employingthese imperfections, the villa’s owners depicted the humble rusticitythey wanted to ascribe to themselves.

Not only aristocrats wanted to imagine them-selves this way. Sukiya proved readily portable,and city-dwellers, who couldn’t a≠ord countryestates, incorporated its elements into theirhomes. “By the nineteenth century,” Lippit notes,“you can have your country living in your town-house, with your garden and your sukiya e≠ects.”

The merchant’s house at the Boston Children’sMuseum, on closer inspection, is full of sukiya touches within itstimber 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 deliber-ately chipped the wood to vary its appearance) is at once struc-tural and decorative. He can trace the legacy of both ancient andearly-modern architecture on every wall panel and woodenbeam. Considered one at a time, these pieces add up to a com-plete history. “You can really only understand a Japanese build-ing,” he says, “by taking it apart.”

Paul Gleason is sta≠ writer at this magazine.

In the Japanese merchant house at theBoston Children’s Museum, Lippit pointsout different wood types in the tokonomaalcove (top right). A master carpenter’stools (right) are also part of the exhibit.

Visit harvardmag.-com/extras to watcha film clip showingthe reconstruction ofthe Boston Children’sMuseum’s Japanesehouse.

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