the soggy life and times: a very late and somewhat sparse post from Kyoto

Was looking back at posts I meant to publish previously, and lo and behold, I came upon one written before I apparently became too busy and grumpy in Kyoto to blog more, entitled the "soggy life and times." I deleted the bits about flooding, as I feel most people probably know what's up regarding the Missouri River at this point, but I did pick out some fun pictures.

First: some work! I made a large 1:30 scale model of a portion of a courtyard in a temple near Nagoya which my office was redesigning to have better circulation and better views onto their garden.

It was an endeavor.

It was uber uber humid in Kyoto . . . I kept all my food in my fridge because I was nervous about the possibility of bugs, and after unintentionally leaving a package of soba out for a night it did this:

the good, the bad, and the ugly

First: The good! There's quite a bit of it.

Today was my first day of work at Design 1st, a (very) small firm (I think it's just the principal and maybe one or two other people) that mainly restores machiya, traditional Japanese townhouses, in Kyoto. The "office" -- actually a small machiya which is currently in the process of being renovated -- is maybe a mile and a half south of my apartment.

The house itself is pretty tiny. The practical person in me cocks a brow at the amount of work it will take to make it really habitable (in a non-camping and non-Mom-living-in-the-old-church kind of way -- flood reference for the win), but the historian and the architect are still going, "SQUEE SQUEE SQUEE SQUEE SQUEEEEEEEEEE!" It's such a neat little structure.

I think my boss said in an email that this house was 200 years old. It's at least a hundred years old, that's for sure. It's probably about twice as big as my studio apartment in total floorspace, and constructed of dark pine beams (stained or aged, I do not know), plaster, and wood paneling. I drew a little picture (see below) to help understand the layout, but basically it's two living rooms, one in front of the other, elevated about 1-2 feet off the ground on platforms. The front one has a screened-in bay that faces the street. There is a ground-level hallway running alongside the two rooms that is two stories tall. In the back of this hallway is where the kitchen area used to be; there's a skylight/smoke opening and the remains of a brick stove. This hallway is sort of the "mud room" area -- the floor is concrete-ish and dirty, you can wear shoes and there are storage cabinets there -- while the two living rooms are the nice areas, where you're supposed to take your shoes off. There's ladder in the hallway that leads to a little platform which opens onto a loft over the back living room (the roof slants down so that there wouldn't be room for a second story in the front room.) The hallway continues straight back to the tiny courtyard with one tree in it, where the plumbing services are -- toilet and what I think was probably a shower, each in its own cubicle. I didn't put this in my drawing, but I think the space between the two cubicles and the back living room (which looks out onto the courtyard through a glass sliding door) had a big dry sink (or wet sink, not sure) in it. (edited to add: drawings not to scale. sort of, but not really.)