京にても / 京なつかしや / 時鳥
松尾芭蕉
わたし"Even in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto", Matsuo Basho (1644, 1694)京
京都の保全
"It's projects such as yours that will eventually percolate down into the consciousness of Kyoto people and alert them to the greatness of the city theyve overlooked until now. Best wishes."
Alex Kerr,
Co-founder of IORI Co.
The Past is not a monument
but an art of living in the present.
This goal of this web site goal, as a
personal project, is twofold:
1) to inform about preservation efforts for historical and vernacular assets of Kyoto in particular and traditional Japan in general,
2) propose my personal vision of a future Kyôto where I would like to live.
contact_kyoto-preservation.info
Kyōto (京都, litteraly « capital city ») is a japanese city which was the imperial capital of Japan between 794 and 1868. It is a city in the central part of the island of Honshu, Japan. It has a population close to 1.5 million. It is now the capital of Kyoto prefecture, as well as a major part of the Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto metropolitan area.
NEW: Featured interviews
Architecte Goeffrey Moussas interview
I spent few days in Kyoto in June and have met several persons involved in Machiya preservation. Please read interview and see pictures of Goeffey work by clicking on the picture bellow. This picture, his office, is a machiya under renovation.
Hiro Araki: Director Machiya Residence Inn / Aj InterBridge Inc.
Read the interview soon
I met with Hiro Araki who manages Machiya Residence Inn in one of the renovated machiya (called Kohakuan) that can be rent for one day or more.
(Read the interview soon)
My name is Bertrand Marquet, I live in France near Paris.
After a (too) short stay in Kyoto, I realized how important is preservation in Kyoto. Asking myself what I can do 10000km away, I have started this web site with the modest intention to make an inventory of those efforts and more important featuring passionate people that act concretely every day to preserve Kyoto.
My intention is not to give any lessons but just understand what is done and give myvision on what should be done and share all my ideas. If you are involved or know persons involved please contact me or join associated Facebook group.
Note that this web site is free of advertising.Consequently it does not bring me any money. I pay each month fees for registration of the kyoto-preservation.info domain. The Wix.com mention cannot be removed without paying a licence to use its flash engine to provide nice interface and fast maintenance. if anyone can help to provide a full html version, I will greatfully accept it.
Also I do not promote any particular private initiative and do not receive any money from anyone. 0n the contrary I have made donation of 20,000 yens to the machiya fund. If anyone can propose me a free ticket to Kyôto to continue this project, I will accept it if this will not imply counterparts in any form.
I am the ony one to decide what will appear on this web site according to my opinion on activities and how do much the preserve or revitalize Kyôto unique atmosphère.
ベルトライン。
you can see me taking the picture in the mirror of the lattice of the machiya.
Machiya (町屋/町家?) are traditional wooden townhouses found throughout Japan and typified in the historical capital of Kyoto. Machiya (townhouses) and nōka (farm dwellings) constitute the two categories of Japanese vernacular architecture known as minka (folk dwellings). Machiya originated as early as the Heian period and continued to develop through to the Edo period and even into the Meiji period. Machiya housed urban merchants and craftsmen, a class collectively referred to as chōnin (townspeople). The word machiya is written using two kanji: machi (町) meaning “town”, and ya (家 or 屋) meaning “house” (家) or “shop” (屋) depending on the kanji used to express it.
Machiya in Kyoto, sometimes called kyōmachiya (京町家 or 京町屋) defined the architectural atmosphere of downtown Kyoto for centuries, and represent the standard defining form of machiya throughout the country.
The typical Kyoto machiya is a long wooden home with narrow street frontage, stretching deep into the city block and often containing one or more small courtyard gardens or tsuboniwa. Machiya incorporate earthen walls and baked tile roofs, and could be one, one and a half, two, or occasionally even three stories high. The front of the building traditionally served as the retail or shop space, generally having sliding or folding shutters that opened to facilitate the display of goods and wares. Behind this mise no ma (店の間, "shop space"), the remainder of the main building is divided into the kyoshitsubu (居室部) or "living space," composed of divided rooms with raised timber floors and tatami mats, and the doma (土間) or tōriniwa (通り庭), an unfloored earthen service space that contained the kitchen and also serves as the passage to the rear of the plot, where storehouses known as kura (倉 or 蔵) are found. A hibukuro (火袋) above the kitchen serves as a chimney, carrying smoke and heat away and as a skylight, bringing light into the kitchen.[2] The plot's width was traditionally an index of wealth, and typical machiya plots were only 5.4 to 6 meters wide, but about 20 meters deep, leading to the nickname unagi no nedoko, or eel beds.
The largest residential room, located in the rear of the main building, looking out over the garden which separates the main house from the storehouse, is called a zashiki (座敷) and doubled as a reception room for special guests or clients.The sliding doors which make up the walls in a machiya, as in most traditional Japanese buildings, provide a great degree of versatility; doors can be opened and closed or removed entirely to alter the number, size, and shape of rooms to suit the needs of the moment. Typically, however, the remainder of the building might be arranged to create smaller rooms including an entrance hall or foyer (genkan, 玄関), butsuma (仏間), and naka no ma (中の間) and oku no ma (奥の間), both of which mean simply "central room".
Machiya design addresses climate concerns. Kyoto can be quite cold in winter, and extremely hot and humid in the summer. Multiple layers of sliding doors (fusuma and shōji) are used to moderate the temperature inside; closing all the screens in the winter offers some protection from the cold, while opening them all in the summer offers some respite from the heat and humidity. Machiya homes traditionally also made use of different types of screens which would be changed with the seasons; woven bamboo screens used in summer allow air to flow through, but help to block the sun. The open air garden courtyards likewise aid in air circulation and bring light into the house.[8]
(Source Wikipedia)
Click on the above image to see some initiatives to preseve machiyas
"From the start, the urban-preservation movement in Kyoto has placed emphasis on the preservation of entire quarters of the city, rather than individual buildings. The machinami concept is essential to preservation efforts in Kyoto because the basic structure of the city—both socially and architecturally—is one of interwoven, interdependent parts...The machinami districts of Kyoto are symbols of a way of life, evolving over the centuries, in which people have learned to survive in tight quarters harmoniously. The difficulty, however, of preserving entire neighborhoods has presented Kyoto with a monumental task. Obtaining the cooperation of an entire community is the first challenge, a prospect considerably more difficult than approaching a single household. Moreover, finding an old neighborhood that has remained relatively intact is a problem for any twenty-first century city, perhaps especially in Japan, where the main thrust of the whole society has been towards total modernization since end of World War II."
Excerpted from “Kyoto, Seven Paths to the Heart of the City,” (Kodansha International) with permission of the author, Diane Durston.(Buy it on amazon.com)
News on Sanneizaka 2010:I've just realized, comparing last year pictures with new ones, that electric wires have been removed (picture of 2009 included)
Sanneizaka is the old path to bring you to the Kyomizu-dera temple on higashiyama (east side of Kyôto)
Virtual Kyoto: Restoring historical urban landscapes using VR technologies
Virtual kyoto project restores the historical city of Kyoto in a virtual reality space.
The goal is to be able to walk through the streets of Kyoto of the olden days on a computer
display. The project involves 3D modelling of the present day Kyoto, and then restoring the
city back to the pre-war period and to the Edo era. GIS are used throughout the project; (a)
to store location and attributes of current buildings; (b) to archive and geo-reference
materials such as cadastral maps, street photos, aerial photos, excavation findings, boring
data, pollen analysis results and historical documents; and (c) to estimate and simulate land
use changes over the periods using aforementioned materials. With the time dimension
added, our end product will be a 4D GIS database of Kyoto that becomes a container of
digitally archived materials, such as drawings and performing arts that are being digitally
archived recently. The database is a real time interactive system, so that users have the
capability of navigating freely in the 4D space. The virtual city acts as an intuitively
comprehensible interface to the database, and we are planning an on-line access to the
virtual city and the database over the internet.
Keiji YANO, Tomoki NAKAYA, Yuzuru ISODA and Yutaka TAKASE
Geography Department, Ritsumeikan University
yano_lt.ritsumei.ac.jp
56-1 Toji-in-kita-machi, Kita-ku, Kyoto
Launch virtual Kyoto
Here
more informations at
http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/acd/cg/lt/geo/coe/index.html
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