IBUSHICommission
The four houses · 四つの民家

Four answers to
four problems.

Minka 民家 means "the houses of the people" — everyone who was not samurai, priest, or noble. It is not a style, and it is not one building. It is four, and what separates them is not taste but climate, tax, and how the household earned its living.

This is the one page on the site where a comparison earns a grid. Everything below is drawn to a single scale so the pitches can be read against each other: a merchant's tile roof at four and a half sun, a gasshō at seventeen.

10 sun · 45°

Nōka

6.5 sun · 33°

Gyoka

4.5 sun · 24°

Machi-ya

19.8 sun · 63°

Gasshō-zukuri

Typical figures for each house at the size it is usually built, on the Inakama module.
 NōkaGyokaMachi-yaGasshō-zukuri
WhereThe Hida basinThe Noto shore and the Sea of Japan coast, two hours over the passThe Sanmachi quarter of Takayama, forty minutes southShirakawa-gō and Gokayama, over the pass
Footprint4 × 6 ken3 × 5 ken3 × 12 ken5 × 10 ken
Area24 tsubo15 tsubo36 tsubo50 tsubo
Kōbai10 sun · 45°6.5 sun · 33°4.5 sun · 24°19.8 sun · 63°
Ridge6 m3.8 m6.6 m11.9 m
RoofKaya thatchKaya thatchKawara tileKaya thatch
CladdingEarth plasterCharred cedarLattice + plasterEarth plaster
Shaped byFarming and the fireSalt windA tax on frontageTwo metres of snow
A traditional farmhouse in a Hida valley: a long low building under a very deep hipped-gable thatched roof, pale earth-plaster walls with dark timber posts, terraced rice fields in front and cedar-forested mountains behind.

Nōka

farmhouse · The Hida basin — Furukawa, Kamioka, and the valleys above them

One room around a fire, and an earth floor you could work in.

The default house of rural Japan, and the one the other three are variations on. A nōka is organised entirely around two things: the earth floor where the work happened, and the fire the family sat around when it stopped.

Read the Nōka →
A fisherman's house on a cold Japanese coast: a low building clad in charred black cedar boards, low-pitched thatched roof weighted along the ridge with rows of grey stones, nets and floats on a rack outside.

Gyoka

fisherman's house · The Noto shore and the Sea of Japan coast, two hours over the pass

Built low, because the wind is the enemy and not the cold.

A fishing household's house is a nōka that has been argued with by the sea. Everything that sticks up gets taken by the wind, everything that faces the weather gets eaten by salt, and the answers to both are visible from the road.

Read the Gyoka →
A traditional merchant townhouse street front: narrow frontage of dark cedar vertical lattice, deep overhanging eaves with grey ceramic tiles, a low second storey with slatted windows, wet stone street in early morning.

Machi-ya

townhouse · The Sanmachi quarter of Takayama, forty minutes south

Frontage was taxed, so the merchant built backwards.

The townhouse is the only one of the four shaped by a tax rather than by weather. Street frontage was assessed, so a merchant bought two or three ken of it and ran twelve or eighteen ken back. Kyoto's name for the result is unagi no nedoko — an eel's bed.

Read the Machi-ya →
A gasshō-zukuri farmhouse in deep snow: an enormous steeply pitched thatched gable roof at about sixty degrees, three storeys tall, with small windows in the triangular gable end.

Gasshō-zukuri

prayer-hands construction · Shirakawa-gō and Gokayama, over the pass

A roof steep enough to shed two metres of snow, tied so it can bend.

Gasshō-zukuri means 'built like hands in prayer', and the name is a description of the gable: two enormous rafter planes leaning against each other at around sixty degrees. It is the most extreme minka and the one that most obviously earns its shape.

Read the Gasshō-zukuri →

Draw one.

Set the bays, the weather, and the earth floor, and watch the section and plan follow. The specification it makes is what we build from.

Sumitsuke — snap a line