as kakebashira, making it easier to divide rooms by installing a range of newly invented sliding fittings: shoji (translucent paper), fusuma (opaque paper), sugido (wooden panels made of Japanese cedar), and mairado (wooden panels with rows of horizontal wooden cross-pieces). The shikidai vestibule, with a wooden floor set at a slightly lower level than the tatami rooms, arose as the predecessor to the modern genkan entrance hall. The shoin style continued to develop over time, attaining its definitive form during the Edo Period (1603–1868) as exemplified by Kyoto’s Nijo Castle, residence of the Tokugawa shoguns.
The next key development was the soan chashitsu (rustic tea house), a small hut for holding tea ceremonies, created during the Azuchi Momoyama Period (1573–1603). The custom of chanoyu (drinking tea) had been introduced to Japan from China many centuries earlier, and was refined in the Zen temples of Kyoto into a precise ritual: chado, the “way of tea.” The practice became fashionable among the aristocracy, who competed in the accumulation of expensive tea ceremony utensils from China and Korea, and gradually gained in popularity with the general public. The tea ceremony tended to be an elaborate performance before a large audience, held in a partitioned-off section of a shoin -style room decorated with an opulence that bordered on vulgarity. It was the Zen Buddhist priest Murata Shuko (1422–1502) who introduced the radical innovation of an intimate gathering in which the host himself served the tea, thus creating the basis for the tea ceremony as it is known today.
The sixteenth century saw the appearance of a room solely used for tea ceremonies, generally with an area of yojohan (four and a half tatami mats, about 7.3 square meters), just enough to hold the host and a few guests. This became the prototype for the soan chashitsu, the design of which was perfected by the celebrated tea master Sen Rikyu (1522–91), chado advisor to Hideyoshi himself. In an explicit rejection of the flamboyance of tea ceremony practices among the aristocracy, the soan chashitsu is intended for a version of the tea ceremony known as wabicha, which emphasizes simplicity, humility, and frugality. Seemingly temporary huts with thatched roofs, wall surfaces of exposed dirt, and wooden elements left in their natural state, these tea houses deliberately recall the impoverished dwellings of ancient Buddhist hermits. While still using many of the elements found in shoin design—tatami mats, tokonoma alcoves, shoji screens—the designs emphasized idiosyncrasy and irregularity, assiduously avoiding repetition and standardization. The ostentatious Chinese implements were substituted with inexpensive, imperfect, everyday Japanese items, albeit selected with exquisite taste. Through an outgrowth of Zen Buddhist practices, the soan chashitsu was empty of religious icons, creating a condensed aesthetic experience of natural materials, their austerity and asperity enhanced by the subtle play of light and shadow.
In a sense, the tea ceremony is considered a form of Zen practice, as expressed in the phrase chazen ichimi: “tea and Zen have the same flavor.” Introverted and hermetic, the soan chashitsu is nevertheless inseparable from the garden in which it is located. The roji (dewy ground) path leading through the garden is intended as a transition from the prosaic world of everyday life to the poetic world of the tea ceremony. Tea gardens tend to be verdant, with overhanging leaves and mossy ground, though without the distraction of brightly colored flowers. Guests follow an artistically composed array of stepping stones—Rikyu stated that they should be 60 percent functional and 40 percent ornamental—passing a toro (stone lantern) and tsukubai (stone water basin) to arrive at the koshikake machiai waiting area. Having been welcomed by the host, guests pass through the tiny nijiriguchi entrance. The space inside also tended to be tiny—the single surviving example of a soan chashitsu believed to have been designed by Rikyu is only two tatami mats (3.2 square meters) in area. Called Taian, it was built in 1582 on the grounds of his residence in Kyoto, but later disassembled and rebuilt at Myoki-an temple, just south of the city.
The understated eclecticism of the soan chashitsu influenced the next major shift in Kyoto’s residential architecture, the sukiya style (more properly called sukiya fu shoin zukuri: the shoin style as influenced by the sukiya). Used interchangeably with chashitsu as a name for the tea house itself, sukiya is an emancipated and idiosyncratic variation on the shoin style. The atmosphere is more relaxed, the spaces smaller, the ceilings lower, the elements thinner, the materials untreated, the compositions relatively uninhibited. To be sure, sukiya architecture often includes whimsical decorative elements at odds with the austere wabicha aesthetic, and rather than the isolated microcosm of the tea house, typical sukiya architecture tends to be open to, and integrated with, its environment; indeed, the surrounding garden should be regarded as a necessary complement to the building. The sukiya style reached its apotheosis with the Katsura Imperial Villa, built in the seventeenth century, but has dominated residential design right up until the modern period and continues to be popular today. While the vast majority of sukiya dwellings still retain some purely shoin -style spaces—the shoin rooms are for important occasions and guests, whereas the sukiya rooms are for daily life and friends—it is with the sukiya style that traditional Japanese architecture attained its fullest maturity and refinement. The underlying modular system of dimensionally coordinated timber frames and infill panels provides a disciplined framework for creations of extraordinary delicacy. Lightweight walls and sliding panels produce fluid, mutable interiors, while the peripheral engawa (veranda) spaces and their layers of lattices and screens enable a flexible integration of outside and inside. Suffused with soft light through mobile shoji panels and open ranma slots above the interior partitions, the predominantly rectilinear patterns that define each surface are accentuated by occasional irregular elements, such as the natural form of the tokobashira corner post in the tokonoma alcove.
While the suffix ya simply means “house,” the prefix suki has been written using various kanji characters across the centuries, phonetically identical but different in meaning. Initially suki used the kanji character , meaning “fondness,” and acclaimed aesthetes would be described as sukisha: people with a fine sense of assurance and discrimination in their aesthetic choices. Generally wealthy members of the aristocracy or nobility with time on their hands, sukisha were devoted to the full range of the arts, which were considered to reach a unified apotheosis in the tea ceremony and its associated implements and spaces. Thus a sukiya was a building designed not only according to personal taste, but according to the exceptional taste of a sukisha. During the Muromachi Period (1336–1573), suki came to be written using the two kanji characters, which are simply a reversal of the kanji for kisu ( “odd number”), thus evoking irregularity or eccentricity. Indeed, in contrast with the Chinese love of even numbers, and hence symmetry and balance, Japanese culture is pervaded by a preference for the asymmetry and tension implied by odd numbers. Gift giving in Japan entails odd-numbered amounts of money bound by cords with an odd number of strands, given on odd-numbered anniversaries.
