My understanding is that in Japanese culture buildings where traditionally torn down and rebuilt periodically (it sticks in my mind something like every 10 or 20 years, but don't quote me on that). Interestingly enough, that apparently includes culturally and/or historically significant buildings and the Japanese don't consider these to be new buildings from a "continuity" standpoint. That is to say, the Japanese would still consider a temple to be hundreds of years old even if it had been torn down and rebuilt multiple times; with all the sense of connection to antiquity that a Westerner might feel when visiting the Sistine Chapel.
An advantage of this approach is that the craftsmanship necessary to build these structures is preserved. Unlike the stories you hear about in Western culture where preservationists have to reconstruct long forgotten techniques.
I think there's a bit of broken telephone here. A few specific buildings, like the Ise Grand Shrine, are rebuilt every couple decades as a cultural practice (or imperial edict) specific to those sites. It definitely does help maintain active practice of traditional construction techniques.
Others, like the Nara Todaiji temple, are very old structures and preserved as best as possible, being repaired and rebuilt only when necessary eg. due to fire or structural damage.
The practice of frequently renovating or rebuilding residential houses is quite unrelated, and more of a postwar trend.
IIRC the pre WWII era Japanese wooden school buildings were at least originally meant to be torched every 2-3 decades and rebuild for hygienical reasons. Not sure if it was ever practiced in the end.
The old techniques didn’t fall out because building stopped. New materials and tools are why. The techniques used for some intricate carving were sure to be lost when electric tools and computer aided machine tech came into existence. The average rough carpenter is probably lousy with a hammer compared to 150 years ago but they can frame a house out just fine using a nail gun.
> The techniques used for some intricate carving were sure to be lost when electric tools and computer aided machine tech came into existence.
No.
The new tools and tech were bound to succeed in a culture that valued reductions in time and labor costs. But there's nothing inevitable about such a culture, and it seems perfectly possible for there to be others that would have ranked the new tools and techniques inferior to the old ones for a variety of reasons.
There's records of it, Graeber details some instances in The Dawn of Everything. As to your definition of culture, I would say it's lacking in sophistication. And when not abandoning it, in many cases it can be foisted upon people.
Imagine a scenario where some people's hand farm, but their traditional trade partners elected to buy into the globalist system: there's simply no way for them to compete against industries of scale. So they're disintegrated from their neighbors and can't rely upon them for trade. And if you look at the record, there is evidence of widespread trade networks from people's dwelling in South/Central America to the North American East. If we take Diamond's word for it, that's a considerable disruption due to the sort of intrinsic constraints he proposed (poor progenitor species for agriculture/beasts of burden) that may present if extremely strict conservativism is abided.
Using math I’d say probably western liberal culture is more likely to survive. Amish culture requires western liberal culture since they can’t defend themselves. If western liberal culture has a successor there’s a lower probability that the Amish are allowed to exist.
and yet square nails have almost been entirely supplanted by cheaper to mass produce round nails. a house built with square nails is going to be vastly superior in structural integrity and longevity all else equal. but they are harder to mass produce and don't fit into a nailgun.
I don't know about that. In my North American city, the old public schools, buildings, bridges, and earthworks from pre-WW2 are embellished with intricate patterns and decorative detailing, even when they are made from reinforced concrete. Buildings made after the war are, almost without exception, made plain and featureless, even when they are also made from reinforced concrete. Modern tools, computers, and electricity don't make it any harder to add detailing (and it's also hard to believe such features become harder to afford as society became wealthier in general).
Yes, I agree. Postwar buildings are much more likely to be featureless compared to 19th or early 20th century buildings, even regular houses. I think the economic boom and demand for new houses and buildings contributed to skipping the sort of traditional detail and ornate finishing work for the sake of moving on to the next project.
Why would we continue to create the same thing? We had access to steel and glass in a way we never did before. He’ll you couldn't create a decent larger sheet of glass until the 1940s. Nails cost more than wood when blacksmiths made them.
What I'm talking about is for example, a nearby school has a concrete embankment because it's built on a hill. Being built around 1910, the concrete surface is intricately and unnecessarily decorated with little arches and buttresses to make it visually appealing. If that same embankment were built today, it would not be made of glass, but rather bare concrete, with the only surface decoration being the formwork grid of tie marks left over from construction, eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadao_Ando#/media/File:Galleri...
Possibly. We need to be careful of selection bias when comparing old construction to new. There was a lot of crap built long ago that wasn’t detailed, etc and it’s gone by now. This happens with houses a lot.
And I’m a person that lives old buildings and their methods!
But there’s also lots of great modern architecture that will survive the test of time. The Calatrava train station in NYC for example. Most public transit stations are unremarkable but that one is amazing.
We still build great things. And crap too. But we always have.
But yeah you’re probably right that in the early 20th century you saw a bit more craftsmanship in vernacular architecture. We had a lot of guys over from the old world with those skills that worked for cheap.
Materials from the postwar period are completely different. Within a decade we had 100 years of tech develop.
Also - compare a building from the 19th cent. To earlier 20th. Those same building you say are intricate are not nearly as much as just decades earlier. Carpenters had access to a lot of new tech starting in the late 1800’s.
When I went to Osaka Castle, the tour info tells you that the building itself is basically a replica of a castle that was sacked and then rebuilt, multiple times over the centuries. The inner and outer baileys -- the stone fortifications -- are original, but the castle itself, which was originally made of wood, is brand new in relative terms.
The Japanese don't remain attached to their buildings, usually because their buildings have been historically likely to be destroyed by earthquake, typhoon, fire, or invasion. In more recent years, yeah -- houses a few decades old will be knocked down to make way for new developments and no one bats an eyelash, but it's because Japanese culture sort of respects the ephemerality of all things, especially manmade things -- one way or another, any given building is going to fall on a timespan of 30-60 years.
Perhaps explaining why the world's oldest company (est. 578) builds Japanese temples. And maybe also why it was recently acquired (2006) - no more rebuilding?
An advantage of this approach is that the craftsmanship necessary to build these structures is preserved. Unlike the stories you hear about in Western culture where preservationists have to reconstruct long forgotten techniques.