Future generations

For traditional carpenters looking at the wood joints of the machiya, old wooden houses and temples must be like heaven.
And ‘fortunately’ most of the houses and temples are burned down or rebuilt. So this technique is still alive and passed to future generations.

I attended a meeting for people living in a machiya. Several different wood joints were exposed: for vertical beam, horizontal beams, corner joints.
They looked like a puzzle and took for most of the attendees some time to discover the right way to open en close the joint.

An architect told me that at this meeting that his father was a carpenter and used to make them all by hand and he learnt this skill from him. So even he could still make many different kind of wood joints by hand.

But this kind of building and renovation is time-consuming and becomes more and more expensive. Also because of so many different kind of wood that is used.