[HN Gopher] 300-Year-Old House Transported Piecemeal Japan to Ca...
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300-Year-Old House Transported Piecemeal Japan to California, Then
Reconstructed
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 54 points
Date : 2024-07-21 00:15 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://www.wsj.com/style/design/japanese-heritage-shoya-hou...
| test1235 wrote:
| This article is about the history and cultural significance of
| the house - nothing of the transportation or reconstruction.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Semi related: For a riveting graphical story about the
| fictional deconstruction of the Empire State building, see
| David Macauly's "Unbuilding". It's one of my favorite books
| ever.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >it was dismantled by Japanese carpenters who then
| reconstructed it here on two acres
|
| >the Shoya house was reconstructed using the methods of
| traditional Japanese carpentry: Aside from complying with
| contemporary building codes, no nails or metal braces were
| used.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| The Huntington website and blog has an article and
| video/interview about the reconstruction:
|
| https://huntington.org/verso/reconstructing-japanese-heritag...
|
| https://huntington.org/japanese-garden/shoya-house
| lmpdev wrote:
| Related:
|
| One of my favourite art pieces is the successful attempt to
| relocate a hoarding Australian master painter's entire Sydney
| flat 1,000km north to northern NSW
|
| Over 20,000 objects had to have been catalogued and replaced,
| _exactly_ where they were at the time of her death
|
| This includes cigarette butts, half eaten food and dead flies etc
|
| I was lucky enough to get to stand in the room (usually 100% off-
| limits no exceptions) it was bizarre that it smelt exactly like
| it wasn't relocated and installed in a sterile art gallery
|
| Worth a visit if you're in South East Queensland or North NSW
|
| https://gallery.tweed.nsw.gov.au/visit/margaret-olley-art-ce...
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> Over 20,000 objects had to have been catalogued and
| replaced, exactly where they were at the time of her death_
|
| There's actually a whole industry specializing in this process,
| mostly centered around Hollywood. Whenever they film at
| someone's house, these companies come in and remove all of
| their personal belongings for shooting, then restore them
| exactly like they were afterwards.
| mentos wrote:
| Would be cool if they laser scanned each of the pieces to share
| openly so that others could attempt to recreate.
| 1GZ0 wrote:
| https://archive.md/20240720151944/https://www.wsj.com/style/...
| a2tech wrote:
| Didn't Larry Ellison do this with an entire Japanese village?
| Except its private and part of the grounds on his estate?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I prefer to track Larry's personal projects by the companies he
| gutted to fund them. Which one would this have been?
|
| Maybe Cerner will be the one that he uses to build the
| sacrifice altar on the volcano on his Hawaiian island.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Larry vs the Volcano?
|
| Will he fare better than Joe?
| vidarh wrote:
| When I saw the headline, I half expected it to be Ellison, and
| was rather surprised to find it wasn't, given his obsession
| with Japan.
| flyingfences wrote:
| HNers in the Boston area can see a similar feat at the Peabody
| Essex Museum, where they have reconstructed in detail the house
| of a merchant from the Qing Dynasty.
|
| https://www.pem.org/yin-yu-tang-a-chinese-home
| cnntth wrote:
| From the Boston(ish) area, the Smithsonian has a 200 year old
| house they reconstructed from Ipswich. Really cool exhibit
| detailing all the different people that went through it and the
| renovations it underwent.
|
| https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/within-th...
| mauvehaus wrote:
| I second the vote to go see this. The museum is really quite
| incredible. They also have a number of period American homes in
| their collection, all right nearby. Because the museum is
| located in Salem[0], visiting in October is highly discouraged.
|
| https://www.pem.org/historic-houses/historic-houses-gardens
|
| If you're visiting the Boston area to see the PEM, you may as
| well take another day and head on up to Manchester, NH. The
| Currier Museum has two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in its
| collection.
|
| https://currier.org/frank-lloyd-wright/
|
| [0] of the infamous witch trials
| mmastrac wrote:
| > visiting in October is highly discouraged
|
| Why?
| sophacles wrote:
| Salem has a tourist industry around the witch trials.
| October is busy season because Halloween.
| mapt wrote:
| I've been to the place this was removed from, Huangcun, a small
| village half an hour from Tunxi in Anhui. Fantastic place - as
| in, like a fantasy setting. Covered in subtropical rainforest.
| Barely connected with reliable roads when I went - several
| landslides during the monsoon. Nearly every flat surface is a
| managed cascade of rice terraces filling in the 50-100m wide
| valleys between straight 30-60 degree slopes, climbing the
| hollows into the hills; It has apparently been in this
| configuration for literally thousands of years. The village is
| a densely packed cluster of old masonry buildings and new
| modern houses. The masonry ancestral temple survived the
| Cultural Revolution partially intact. Visitor accommodations
| are in a side building constructed much like Yin Yu Tan at
| around the same time period.
|
| They were trying to use the Peabody Essex money to start a
| tourist industry there without it being as obscenely
| overdeveloped as the nearby World Heritage Site at Hongcun.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There is also an Egyptian tomb in the Metropolitan Museum of
| Art in New York.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_Perneb?wprov=sfti1
| vlabakje90 wrote:
| The Ishtar gate of Babylon is in the Pergamon Museum in
| Berlin: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_Gate
| jalk wrote:
| The Open Air Museum in Denmark is a museum of old buildings from
| all over the region
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frilandsmuseet
|
| > The museum features more than 100 buildings from rural
| environments and dating from 1650-1950. All buildings are
| original and have been moved piece by piece
| seanhunter wrote:
| This made me think of two similarish things in the UK:
|
| 1)In Kew gardens there is a Japanese "Minka" house that was
| donated to Kew by the Japanese government. It was lived in by a
| Japanese family in Nagasaki after their home was bombed in 1945,
| and some time later was transported to Kew piece by piece and
| rebuilt using traditional methods.[1] The house itself is a
| beautiful and simple wooden house and sits in a lovely bamboo
| garden inside Kew (which is of course also very lovely) and seems
| to me based on its history a sort of quiet protest against
| nuclear war.
|
| 2) "Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View" is an extraordinary
| artwork by Cornelia Parker at the Tate Modern. The artist took
| her garden shed with all of its contents and blew it up with
| explosives and made this artwork comprising two parts. The first
| is a video of the explosion on a loop so you see the shed
| exploding and coming back into a single piece over and over
| again. The second is the installation, which is a sort of "real
| life freeze frame" of an instant in the explosion in which all
| the fragments are suspended from the ceiling in the positions
| they were in at that moment and lit by a single source so it
| casts very dramatic shadows.[2]
|
| [1] https://www.kew.org/kew-gardens/whats-in-the-
| gardens/bamboo-...
|
| [2] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/parker-cold-dark-
| matter...
| gomox wrote:
| Seems like a wildly different weather/climate than this house
| would have normally been in. I wonder whether that impacts the
| longevity of these constructions.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| > I wonder whether that impacts the longevity of these
| constructions.
|
| Probably positively--Shikoku Island is quite a bit more
| tropical/humid than LA. I'd imagine a timber-framed house that
| has already endured centuries in a more humid climate would do
| just fine in a milder/drier climate.
| morning-coffee wrote:
| Genuinely curious, as the article is paywalled, but I wonder what
| necessitated the house having to come across the ocean? Could it
| not have been preserved or relocated somewhere within Japan?
| mazugrin2 wrote:
| I imagine there are innumerable 300 year old houses being
| preserved in Japan and that crossing the ocean wasn't needed to
| preserve this particular one. But this will be able to be
| appreciated by people in Los Angeles without traveling so far.
| It seems similar to how Japanese art is already shown in
| Californian museums and how Californian art is shown in
| Japanese ones. "Genuinely curious" people like to be exposed to
| culture from other places.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| I posted this unpaywalled link:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/style/design/japanese-heritage-shoya-hou...
|
| 30 seconds after posting the article.
| havblue wrote:
| The Huntington Estate is definitely worth a day (and an excellent
| place to take the family) if you want to avoid the usual tourist
| traps in Southern California. Gardens, art, great food, not too
| crowded even.
| lightedman wrote:
| Hard to be crowded when the place is just so absolutely
| massive.
| neilyio wrote:
| You'll want to reserve ahead on a weekend! They have strict
| capacity limits, which is why it never feels too crowded.
|
| I'm amazed at how many of us in Los Angeles live here for years
| and skip this place. It's one of the most beautiful places I've
| ever been.
| guyzero wrote:
| The Cultural Exchange building at Hakone Gardens on Saratoga CA
| (near San Jose) was constructed in a similar manner - the
| building was designed and built in Japan, disassembled, shipped
| over and then reassembled on-site. Done in 1990 though, so not a
| historical building.
|
| https://www.hakone.com/history
| sojsurf wrote:
| Henry Ford did something similar with a beautiful English cottage
| from the early 1600s.
|
| > In 1929, Henry purchased the property for $5,000 and
| immediately hired a team of local builders to restore the
| structures to more accurately reflect the era in which they were
| built. Upon completion, the workers dismantled them stone by
| stone, numbering each one individually and packing them in gravel
| sacks that were transported to the United States via train and
| boat.
|
| https://victoriamag.com/touch-england-cotswold-cottage/
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| There's a similar one in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It's modeled after
| the emperor's residence in Kyoto, and was also transported by
| ship and assembled in place.
|
| http://photo.rique.pro/photos/2023-03-30-pavilhao-japones.ht...
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(page generated 2024-07-23 23:15 UTC)