Japanese Traditional

Traditional Japanese buildings use post-and-beam timber frames, often joined with interlocking wooden joints instead of nails, raised floors and deep eaves that project well beyond the walls. Rooms are divided by fusuma, sliding panels covered with opaque paper, and shoji, sliding screens of translucent paper on a wooden lattice, which can be removed to join rooms or open them to a veranda and garden. Floors are covered with tatami, straw mats of a standard size of roughly 90 by 180 centimeters, and room sizes are counted in mats.

The Kondō, or main hall, of Hōryū-ji in Ikaruga, near Nara, is widely recognized as the oldest wooden building in the world. Ise Grand Shrine in Mie Prefecture has plain cypress buildings with thatched roofs, rebuilt on an adjacent site every 20 years. Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto (17th century) is a group of pavilions in the sukiya style, a plain manner derived from the tea house, laid out in a staggered plan.

Buddhism reached Japan in the 6th century, and with it came Chinese temple building with tiled roofs, bracketed eaves and large timber halls. Prince Shōtoku founded Hōryū-ji in 607; after a fire in 670 it was rebuilt, with work finished around 711. Shinto shrines kept older native forms. At Ise the buildings are modeled on raised rice granaries, and the 20-year rebuilding, called Shikinen Sengū, began in the late 7th century; the 62nd took place in 2013.

Residential forms changed by period. Shinden-zukuri aristocratic houses of the Heian period (794-1185) had open halls with few fixed walls. Shoin-zukuri houses of the Muromachi period (1336-1573) used fusuma and shoji to divide rooms, and sukiya-zukuri, influenced by tea houses, appeared in the late 1500s. Katsura Imperial Villa was begun by Prince Hachijō Toshihito in the 1620s and expanded by his son Toshitada. The German architect Bruno Taut praised it in the 1930s in his book Nippon, and Walter Gropius visited in 1953.