Article ID: CBB840594344

'The Way We Build': Craft, Innovation, and Sustainability in Japanese House-Carpentry (2021)

unapi

This article expands and complicates the literature on “craft” by examining the seeming anomaly of a craft community dominating a significant production sector within an advanced industrial economy, and despite the existence of cheaper high-tech and labor-saving alternatives. Japanese house-carpenters, organized into very small firms with very local markets, and producing “traditional” house-frames in small batches, have long held prefabrication and other alternatives at bay through a process of conservative innovation. The primary goal of their innovative process has been the protection and continuance of house-carpentry as a relevant and marketable skill, and of its practitioners as a self-sustaining community. This craft is not an exemplar of sustainability in other ways, however, despite its association with the traditional and organic. Its house-products have unnaturally short lives given Japanese methods of accounting for property value, and its raw material, foreign-sourced old-growth forests, are increasingly subject to global conservation efforts.

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Article Francesca Bray; Gregory Clancey; Annapurna Mamidipudi (2021) Introduction: Building Sites, Crafting Knowledge. HOST: Journal of History of Science and Technology (pp. 1-16). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Nègre, Valerie
Robby Zidny
Ren Congcong
Oge, Margo T.
Harufumi Tamazawa
Shaw, Isabel
Concepts
Crafts and craftspeople
Traditional knowledge
Building construction
Sustainability
Technological innovation
Architecture
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
Early modern
21st century
Renaissance
Ancient
Places
China
Japan
Europe
India
Africa
Burkina Faso
Institutions
Georgia Institute of Technology
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