Kesurokai

European wood carving

A happy memory from the last night of the project when, after successfully completing both buildings, we partied in the light of the barbecue fire in the European building:

The metalwork for the barbecue was made on site by Manne and Gunther our blacksmiths and the horse's head holding it was made by another of our group, German carver Rahel Schroeder who was also assisted for a while by the wood carver from the Japanese group:

Rahel also carved across the front of the building; a European plane one side, a Japanese plane the other and the inscription Schoen ist wenn altes bleibt wo neues entsteht. We had a long discussion about how best to translate that into English and my favourite version, conveying the emotion rather than a literal meaning, is Beauty is keeping with tradition whilst developing new things.

This was a huge task for such a short project which Rahel managed amazingly well. For the main inscription she trained up two others from our group who had come along because their partners were carpenters; Anna-Katharina Krodel, who is a goldsmith, and Lina Gillefalk who is a buildings conservation specialist.

Blacksmiths' nails

An article about our visit to Japan has just been published in the Japan Times (link here). It is alway a worry that journalists who drop by for a few hours can completely miss the point of an event, but Winnie spent a long time on site chatting to people, did her background research and on the whole it is a lovely article. 

Just one point of correction, the nails made by the blacksmiths definitely weren't just for show. They were for parts of the buildings that will stay assembled. Those the Japanese blacksmith were delicately beautiful with a little curl at the top:

They were used to hold together the side panels - photo below left - a row of them just below the feet of the carpenter in the roof and at head height of those on the ground. However they are not visible when finished - photo below right - as a strengthening piece of wood is slotted in front and held in place with wedges:

 

Yoshida san the blacksmith is in the picture on the right watching Amemiya san with the beautiful hanger he also made to suspend the kettle above the fire. It has a very sweet little mechanism to adjust the height and is for me typical of Japanese understated design aesthetic. 

Those nails made by the European blacksmiths were just a s beautiful in their own way, but larger and more robust because they were destined to hold part of the roof together.

They went in the part where the roof splayed out half way down. Some of these pieces were constructed beforehand and others were assembled in situ:

Manne and Gunther, the European blacksmiths, also made a beautiful hanging barbecue and I'll post some pictures of that separately. (After a break to mark some student work - that's what pays the bills! - I am back processing Kesurokai video and currently studying footage of the construction of the European frame. More about that to follow later in the week.)

Tea House construction (video)

Here is a video of the Japanese Tea house being put together, probably filmed over a period of around 4-5 hours. The Japanese carpenters are very precise and each part actually went together and was taken apart again several times until they were satisfied with the fit.

It is difficult to estimate how long it took to prepare the timbers, but it was made entirely from trees that were felled on the worksite and converted using hand tools. The Japanese carpenters had done quite a bit of background work before we got there and then a mixed Japanese / European group of 15-20 people spent a solid seven days of work on it before this final construction.

 My previous post shows step-by-step photographs if you want to understand what is happening in detail.