Tokonoma
Extracts from “The fundamentals of Japanese architecture”
a lecture given by Bruno Taut at The Society for International Cultural Relations. Tokyo · March 1936.
[Toko] floor or bed · [no] attributive suffix · [ma] space or room
A Japanese term referring to a built-in recessed space in a reception room, a kind of alcove. The tokonoma and its contents are essential elements of Japanese interior decoration. The items displayed in this recess are typically calligraphic or pictorial scrolls and an arrangement of flowers. There is a pillar on one side, usually of wood. Stepping inthe tokonoma is forbidden except when the display is to be changed, and then a strict etiquette of procedure must be observed. Frank Lloyd Wright interpreted the tokonoma as a kind of fireplace, and in his designs it became a ceremonial core. Another custom connected with the tokonoma concerns the seating of guests. In a Japanese home the most important visitors are placed with their backs to the tokonoma because the host must display an appropriate modesty and not impose his taste. [1]
Bruno Taut on Tokonoma
“ Tokonoma’ is a Japanese term referring to a built-in recessed space in a reception room, a kind of alcove. The tokonoma and its contents are essential elements of Japanese interior decoration. The items displayed in this recess are typically calligraphic or pictorial scrolls and an arrangement of flowers. There is a pillar on one side, usually of wood. Stepping in the tokonoma is forbidden except when the display is to be changed, and then a strict etiquette of procedure must be observed. Frank Lloyd Wright interpreted the tokonoma as a kind of fireplace, and in his designs it became a ceremonial core. Another custom connected with the tokonoma concerns the seating of guests. In a Japanese home the most important visitors are placed with their backs to the tokonoma because the host must display an appropriate modesty and not impose his taste.
“ The tokonoma, as a place fixed for things of culture, art and the spirit, represents a unique creation of Japan and a solution of absolute validity which deserves to be imitated in changed form in each time and in each country. To speak only of painting, millions of pictures are being painted, but the artists do not know what the people who buy them will do with them, or where they will put them; while in the Japanese house their use and place are quite clear. For the rest, however, the Japanese room remains neutral. No reminiscences attach to dark comers, and Western “coziness” is lacking as well as much furniture, carpets, curtains, table cloths, cushions, pictures, wall-papers and so forth. Just as the air in the room is completely changed by being open to the outside, so the reminiscences attached to the walls and comers —reminiscences which all too easily oppress the inhabitants—are erased as though impressed in dough. “
Bruno Taut on art
“ Art, though not definable in itself, is something which evades all calculations and rational formulation, but which nevertheless influences the intellect —indeed, without it the intellect would be sterile— and is by no means a thing of mysticism and vagueness. The art form is a product of the emotions which under favourable conditions select very decisively from experience and then give the art form, however hidden its sources, objective existence.
Bruno Taut on the importance of the tea House
[shibui · silent and quietly contemplative harmony]
“… Their beauty—often great —is beyond question, and yet in spite of all its fineness it is in itself sterile for modem Japan. This is not architecture, but improvised lyricism, so to speak. But lyricism does not, as in poetry, readily convey itself in wood, bamboo, shoji , mats, stucco and so forth. The old masters of the tea ceremony stressed the unique subjectivity of the pure beauty of this atmosphere. They declared that it would be lost by repetition and they would certainly pronounce all the elements of the tea-house to be “cheap”; entrances made of trees left in their natural states, stucco applied on round bamboo, and even the rustic fence, the irregular stones in the garden, and the garden itself with its thousands of imitations in hotels, restaurants and private homes. The meditative universal mood underlying Zen was too elevated not to degenerate easily. What was meant to be a unique expression of spiritual personality of a restful character turned to be petrified rules and dry academicism- — not only in the architectural details but in the tea ceremony itself. Many of the details of construction of the tea-house were taken over into private homes, partly to their advantage, as may be seen in their quiet atmosphere as a whole, but especially when they exhibit genuine “Tea-taste”—which is usually the case in Kyoto. This taste strictly excludes carved or filigreed decorations in the woods of the ramma (a kind of transom), all abnormalities of proportion, and all dwarfish things; for according to its origin in Zen it asks for the atmosphere of shibui (silent and quietly contemplative harmony).
[1] extracts from an review of “Tokonoma” by Katsuya Nakamura (Editor), Hirotaro Ohta (Contributor) 1958