Traditional Architecture: Standing Strong – Chatroom Japan
when you’re working with the different hand tools in particular but there you’re learning through resistance is kind of like what the tree is saying sometimes and if you don’t listen and you just push it then uh you make mistakes my name is John Stolenmire i live in Okyama Japan i’m originally from the United States and I’m a carpenter [Music] i was more moved by the traditional Japanese wooden spaces than I was by most of the modern spaces everything from homes to temples to shrines that are hundreds of years old sometimes over a thousand and to for that to be a pretty common thing is truly stunning [Music] most people don’t get a chance to fell a tree by hand with an axe but the first time you do that and that 70-year-old tree comes down and hits the ground I don’t know i cried like a baby because I took a life you know and that changes your perspective on the you know the work that you’re doing the reality of that whole set of tools it’s going to teach you so much about the way a tree grows and its grain it’s just your understanding of the geometry of your body and to be able to read the wood before you strike it and it shows you uh just frankly you know when you do it wrong everything looks horrible [Music] his his structural language that he was working with was really traditional that struck me uh I learned that there’s still people doing this older style and a lot of the merits of it as well uh from talking with him and so I went to go see the project he was working on and uh and then I kind of you know pushed my way in the door and now we’re kind of spreading our wings to not just working in Okyama and Japan but also internationally and also starting a school uh to teach people and give them a little bit of a
window into what this kind of mystery world of Japanese architecture and carpentry is the joinery is very sophisticated and very complex and requires a great deal of refinement in your techniques to get right uh that impressed me enormously uh and the approach that they take to it which is uh you know being one with the wood and one with the intention of what the wood is for and that’s very impressive if you look at a thousand years of tradition it feels old if you look at 500 years of tradition it looks old at some point this is going to be what people think of as tradition um and the reality is it is right now it’s alive it’s never dying um and it has uh plasticity the ability to change um and uh to reflect on that all that history and all that learning and all that wisdom and change intelligently for the future tradition is now tradition’s alive let’s create the future of tradition together
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An American carpenter in Okayama cuts down trees and carves them into interlocking joints using traditional techniques.