Thinking about Joinery #01

Hello.

Last time, I rambled on about how the standards we hold in our minds aren't necessarily the norm when you change your environment, and how that's something you often can't realize without experiencing it firsthand.

So, this time I'd like to talk about joinery (tategu).

Joineryis generally defined asa collective term for doors, sliding doors, and the like installed in openingsthat have frames in architecture. It feels like a tool for entering and exiting rooms from the outside, ventilation, lighting, or blocking those things off. It has also been used
in Japanese life since long agoas a way to partition rooms.

■ What is joinery?

The reason I'm bringing this up so suddenly is that my family business, Kurashima Woodworking, started as a joinery shop, and we still make shoji screens, fusuma sliding doors, and other joinery today.

The starting point for my design ideas is joinery, and I often develop my concepts by thinking about Japanese culture through the lens of joinery.
Therefore, the main reason is that I'd like to talk about the lessons I've learned from joinery when visiting traditional Japanese folk houses at some point.

So, I will continue.

As I mentioned earlier, joinery iscoming and going or partitioning, which issomething that exists between rooms (or the outside). In particular, most old folk houses were designed to be partitioned by joinery.
If you have ever seen a folk house that is open to the public, you might be able to imagine that there are fusuma or wooden doors in the middle of rooms that are connected in a continuous line.
Those are the joinery used for partitioning.

There is joinery not just inone direction, but in two, three, or four directions. They are commonly called"partitioning doors," and as the name suggests, they are tools for partitioning space.

For example, they are usually left open, but when eating or sleeping,you close the partitioning doors, and the space transforms into a dining room or bedroom. Furthermore, since the joinery is just placed in a frame, in situations where many people come over, such as for weddings or funerals, you can remove them to
connect the rooms and turn them into a large hall.

In this way, I think it can be said that people in the past lived their daily lives while transforming spaces using joinery according to the season, events, and daily needs, and that joinery was a device (tool) for creating space according to the intentions of the inhabitants.
Because of this role, joinery is sometimes calledmoving walls.

■ Even just placing it gently

When you add types like lattices, shoji, fusuma, and wooden boards, the changes in use become a bit more varied, but first, I talked about the meaning of joinery asa moving wall that creates space.

Nowadays, we have individual rooms with fixed walls, and I think a certain level of privacy is maintained even among family members.
However, if you don't need to block things off that much, you can create a boundary without it being as large-scale as those walls, or even without putting it in a frame.
For example, just by gently placing something like a partition,we can consciously recognize that there is a boundary,which we can perceive.

I think that is a form of communication that conveys meaning without having to put it into words. It's not a warning sign like 'No Entry! Danger!', but rather the ability to encourage 'peaceful awareness'is one of theadvantages of joinery.

Currently, due to the influence of COVID-19, acrylic boards are being used as partition panels.
While preventing the spread of droplets, because they are transparent acrylic boards, people can see each other, so a gentle connection is maintained. In this respect, that is also one of the joinery-like characteristics from my perspective.

In this way, I would like to convey the roles and effects of joinery while replacing the meaning I saw in the joinery of folk houses with things familiar to us today.

With that said, I'll leave it here for now and continue talking about joinery next time.

I would be happy if you could join me.

See you then.

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