The dojo - WIP

Hi all

Over the last few weeks (it's taken me a while due to a long run of nights) I've been making a building for Bushido.  It's still a work in progress but I thought I would show you the basic building to give you a flavour of what it will look like.  I wanted to try to stick to some kind of historical accuracy, so googled Japanese feudal buildings for reference material. I also looked on the Bushido website and there was an interesting building(s) by one of the forum dwellers there.

So here we are, Japanese architecture was heavily influenced by the Chinese and other Asian cultures.  Partly due also to the variety of climates in Japan and the millennium encompassed between the first cultural import and the last, the result is extremely heterogeneous, but several practically universal features can nonetheless be found. First of all is the choice of materials, always wood in various forms (planks, straw, tree bark, paper, etc.) for almost all structures. Unlike both Western and some Chinese architecture, the use of stone is avoided except for certain specific uses, for example temple podia and pagoda foundations.

The general structure is almost always the same: posts and lintels support a large and gently curved roof, while the walls are paper-thin, often movable and in any case non-carrying. Arches and barrel roofs are completely absent. Gable and eave curves are gentler than in China and columnar entasis (convexity at the center) limited.

the main building, sorry about the photo, but it was a rare bright day! 

For the main building, which will consist of a single room called a "Moya" I used foamboard for the walls, although a little thick for traditional paper construction Japanese builders also used other materials for the walls as they were more often than not non-weight bearing (the weight of the roof taken up by specialist support brackets called a "Tokyo") I used coffee stirrers as the frames for the walls. Houses were commonly raised off the ground with large verandas and an all encompassing roof which is often half the size of the building. So I reached for the coffee stirrers once more and laid out a floor space supported by balsa posts. I wanted the roof to be detachable so the interior is fully playable so I hot glued cross beams on the support posts to form a frame. I then made a corresponding frame for the roof. Using coffee stirrers to form a curved roof to give it a Far- Eastern feel, I then cut rows of tiles and laid them across the beams.

the floor plan

cutting the floor planks

ready to go (this was not enough....d'oh!)

the veranda and main floor

the roof frame work, note the curve of the tile supports

cutting the row of tiles was the most laborious part

progress

a curved roof tile, this would be covered in filler and shaped

the finished roof and pagoda that will cap the roof.  Master Po and Kintaru also being based show size comparison

I made a little set of steps for access to the building before making a little platform/pagoda on the roof for a lookout, I know this is a little less traditional but I wanted to add a bit of da Gobbo's character into it and in all honesty I wasn't sure how I was going to finish the roof (a plain cap was just too boring!)

So far, so good? Thoughts and comments welcome.

dGG