Architecture that loosens formality: how to read sukiya

Sukiya is architecture that brought the thinking of the tea room into the home. Pillars without sharp corners, no nageshi rail, an alcove free of fixed rules. Set it beside the formal shoin style and you see how sukiya created lightness by choosing what not to do. From Katsura Imperial Villa to modern sukiya and Kasui-en.

A dwelling born of the tea ceremony

In the mid-Muromachi period, the word suki came to mean wabi tea. The place where tea was held was called a sukiya, and by the Edo period the term had spread to houses and restaurants built with the same methods. Sukiya-zukuri is a style of dwelling that takes in the methods of tea-room architecture.

Its source is the rustic thatched tea house developed by Sen no Rikyu. Taian, a National Treasure at Myokian temple in Oyamazaki, Kyoto, is a tea room of just two tatami mats, with an anteroom and a service space of one mat each. It is attributed to Rikyu, though without proof, and its date is disputed. Into a tiny space it concentrates humble materials and devices such as clay walls, logs and lattice windows.

Seen beside the shoin style

The shortest way to understand sukiya is to set it beside the formal shoin style. Shoin was the official dwelling of samurai and temples: square posts tied with a nageshi rail, and an alcove, staggered shelves and a built-in desk placed in a fixed arrangement. Sukiya unpicks those rules one by one.

The clearest difference is the corners of the posts. Instead of squared timber, sukiya uses menkawa posts that keep the surface of the log at their corners. Four faces are planed and polished, but the corners keep the wood’s natural curve. Without sharp corners, the tension of the whole room relaxes.

The nageshi was originally a structural member tying the posts together. After the through-tie (nuki) spread from the 14th century, its structural role faded and it remained as decoration. Sukiya leaves it out. The upper wall becomes clean, and the eye drifts naturally downward, toward the floor and the garden.

Sukiya is sometimes said never to colour its wood, but some reference works note that the visible timber may be tinted. It is safer to say that sukiya usually lets natural materials show.

Words for reading sukiya

• Menkawa post: usually cedar or cypress, planed and polished on four faces, with bark or natural surface left at the corners.
• Tokobashira: the post beside the alcove that sets its width. In rustic tea rooms, logs of pine, mulberry, cedar, chestnut or bamboo are used.
• Otoshigake: the crosspiece across the top of the alcove, parallel to its front edge. In tea rooms, slender cedar, red pine or paulownia.
• Shitaji-mado: a window where the clay is left off to show the lattice of bamboo or reed beneath. Rikyu brought this farmhouse technique into the tea room.
• Ajiro ceiling: thin strips of cedar or cypress, cedar bark or bamboo woven and fixed as a ceiling.
• Saobuchi ceiling: boards laid in one direction, with battens crossing them at intervals of roughly 30 to 40 cm.

Katsura Imperial Villa: halls in a flight of geese

The name always cited as the model of sukiya is Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. Prince Hachijo Toshihito founded it, and his son Prince Toshitada extended it. Construction began around 1615, and around 1663 the New Palace was built to receive the retired Emperor Go-Mizunoo.

Its halls, from east to west the Old Shoin, Middle Shoin, Music Room and New Palace, are joined in a diagonal line, each stepped back from the last. The arrangement is called ganko, after a flight of wild geese. In the Old Shoin, cedar menkawa posts are used and no nageshi is fixed. By not making the building one large mass, and stepping it toward the garden, every room gets a view. Bruno Taut’s praise made the villa famous worldwide.

The halls step back so that the garden can be shared out to every room.

Roofs kept low and thin

Sukiya roofs most often take the irimoya or gable form. Irimoya combines a gable at the top with a hipped roof sloping four ways below. In sukiya, these roofs are kept low, with effort spent on making the eaves look thin.

The slope of a Japanese roof is expressed in sun: how many units it rises for every ten across. A 4-sun pitch rises 4 for every 10. Tile roofs need a certain slope, but metal roofs such as copper can shed rain at a gentler pitch. Part of why copper is common on sukiya is that it makes low, thin roofs easier to build.

The solid line is a 4-sun pitch; the dashed lines show 2-sun and 6-sun for comparison.

Modern sukiya

Modern architects inherited sukiya’s thinking. Isoya Yoshida (1894–1974) created his own “new sukiya” using ookabe walls that hide the posts, coarsely latticed shoji and new materials.

In 1959 Togo Murano designed Kasui-en, an annex of the Miyako Hotel (now The Westin Miyako Kyoto) at Keage in Kyoto. Thin copper roofs are carried on steel, and irimoya roofs are layered one over another. Hiroshi Nakamura, who supervised the rooms in the 2020 renovation, described it as having “a sense of floating created by its many layered eaves”.

At the Hotel Okura Tokyo main building (1962), Yoshiro Taniguchi brought Japanese design into the lobby. At The Okura Tokyo, opened in 2019, his son Yoshio Taniguchi recreated that lobby. The “Okura Lanterns”, based on faceted kiriko beads, and tables and chairs arranged like plum blossoms carry the spirit of sukiya into a modern lobby.

Read sukiya when you stay

When you enter a sukiya room, first look at the corners of the posts: rounded or square? Then check whether a nageshi runs above the walls. Then sit down and lower your gaze. Under the low eaves the garden is framed, and the scale of the view changes from when you stood. Sukiya is designed for the eye level of someone seated.

Where to see this technique

• Kasui-en (The Westin Miyako Kyoto) (Kyoto, 1959, Togo Murano): low, thin copper roofs layered one over another

Sources

• Digital Daijisen, Heibonsha World Encyclopedia, Britannica Japan, Nipponica: “Sukiya-zukuri”, “Taian”, “Katsura Imperial Villa”, “Isoya Yoshida” (Kotobank)
• JAANUS (Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System): menkawabashira, tokobashira, otoshigake, shitajimado, saobuchi tenjou, nageshi, irimoya-zukuri, kobai
• Kikuyou Bunka Kyokai, “Katsura Imperial Villa”
• architecturephoto (3 June 2020); Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP, “Kasui-en”; Obayashi Corporation works
• Coverage of the opening of The Okura Tokyo (Time Out Tokyo, 2019)