手
On Craft — 手仕事について
The work is not ours alone.
A residence of any scale is a collaboration of dozens. The studio maintains a permanent network of eighty-four artisans across twelve Japanese prefectures, including nine Living National Treasures.
Take, for example, the plaster walls of our Daikanyama Library-House: finished by a Gifu master plasterer we have worked with since 2011, applied in seven hand-compressed layers over forty-one days. Or the cedar shelving of the same project: book-matched, glued, and assembled on site by an Awaji-based joiner, third-generation, whose father we commissioned for our second project in 2010.
Or the washi screens in the Higashiyama machiya: made from the inner bark of paper mulberry harvested within a hundred kilometres of our atelier, pressed and dried by a Mino paper-maker, framed in profile by a Kyoto carpenter trained in temple joinery. None of these collaborators appear in our published credits; they require no introduction. The walls themselves are the introduction.
On our craft lineage — 工芸の系譜について
