takahei-zukuri　 高塀造

KEY WORD :　architecture / folk dwellings

Also pronounced takahe-zukuri. Lit., high wall construction. Also called *yamatomune 大和棟, yamato-zukuri 大和造, or houren-zukuri 法蓮造 in Nara. A roofstyle found in late Edo period farmhouses, nouka 農家, mainly in the plains of Yamato 大和 and Kawachi 河内 (now Nara and Osaka), though examples are also found in southern Yamashiro 山城 and Western Iga 伊賀 (now in Kyoto and Mie prefectures). The main part of the house (the family living zone or kyoshitsubu 居室部 and often that part of the earth-floored area *doma 土間 immediately adjacent to it has a steep thatched gabled roof *kirizuma 切妻, fringed with tiled pent roofs *hisashi 廂 of shallower pitch at the front and rear. It is the gable walls, *takahei 高塀, of the thatched portion that give the style its name. A form of wing walls *sodekabe 袖壁 finished in white plaster and given a tiled coping, the walls are sometimes constructed so that they stand above the thatch, while in other cases they are in the same plane or slightly recessed. Conceptually they have much in common with the truss post *udatsu 卯立 in its developed Edo-period phase as a firebreak, particularly at the lower end *shimote 下手 of a building, where the gable wall abuts a lower tiled roof *kamaya 竈屋 with a smoke outlet *kemuridashi 煙出し astride the ridge. There was often another lower ridge *ochimune 落棟 abutting the gable wall at the upper end *kamite 上手 of the building. This contained a reception suite and might be tiled or thatched. Ridge treatment of the central thatched roof between the gable walls varied: in older examples it was thatched, but more recent examples are tiled. Takahei-zukuri first appears in farmhouses of the highest status in Yamato and Kawachi in the mid-18c, and it was not until well into the Meiji period that examples began to proliferate among middle-income farmers. Until that time it was clearly an exclusive symbol of local pre-eminence to which the ordinary farmer could not aspire. Moreover, some of the earliest examples (such as the Naka 中 house at Ando 安堵 in Nara. Takabayashi 高林 house in Sakai 堺, and Yoshimura 吉村 house at Habikino 羽曳野 in the plain of Kawachi, all dating from the 16c or 17c) originally had thatched, *irimoya yane 入母屋屋根, structures and were converted to takahei-zukuri in the 18c. The development of the style may possibly be linked to the development of the truss post in an urban context as a firebreak.

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