Brick, Timber and Felt: Eleven Building Traditions from Japan to the Caucasus

Start with the timber frame. The entry describes a tradition whose structural principles stayed largely consistent across millennia, with change mostly in decoration, and which favored bilateral symmetry, enclosed courtyards and horizontal emphasis over height. Because wood decays, much of what is known of older buildings comes from ceramic models and written specifications.

Japan turned away from Chinese models after it ended official missions to Tang China in 894. The Heian mansion that resulted was open and nearly wall-free, with raised floors, tatami, cypress bark roofs and unpainted pillars, laid out around a south-facing shinden on a plot of about one cho.

The next Japanese step came with the warrior class in the Muromachi period. The entry names the tokonoma alcove, staggered shelves, built-in desk and rooms floored entirely in tatami, and says this style became the basis of the traditional Japanese house as built today.

A different Japanese-adjacent world: the Ainu hilltop compounds of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kurils. The entry counts more than five hundred and twenty chashi, palisaded at roughly one and a half times a person's height, most built in the early seventeenth century as trade with the Japanese intensified competition for resources.

Here the building is a tent. The ger is a circular structure on a collapsible wooden frame covered in layers of wool felt, and the entry notes that temple builders later echoed its round shape with six or twelve angled plans and pyramidal roofs.

Turning south, the Cham of central and southern Vietnam built in reddish fired brick where the neighboring Khmer used grey sandstone. A typical complex paired the brick sanctuary tower called a kalan with a mandapa, a saddle-roofed fire-house and a gopura gate-tower, at sites such as My Son and Po Nagar.

Sukhothai in northern Thailand blended Khmer, Sri Lankan and local sources. The entry singles out the lotus-bud stupa, with the principal stupa of Wat Mahathat built in 1345, beside laterite prangs in Khmer style and bell-shaped stupas in the Lanka manner.

In India the same habit of blending appears in temples. Vesara joins the site layouts of southern Dravidian architecture to the shape details of northern Nagara, and its name comes from the Sanskrit word for mule. The entry records that scholars disagree whether its fully developed form belongs to the Western Chalukyas or the Hoysala period.

Moving west along the Silk Road, the entry centers on Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and other cities whose palaces, mausoleums, mosques and minarets carry colorful mosaics and geometric patterns, with the Timurid period of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries as the high point.

In Iran from 1781 to 1925, the Qajar builders revived pre-Islamic Persian motifs from the Achaemenid and Sasanian periods while also adopting Neoclassical, Neo-Baroque and Neo-Byzantine forms. The entry names the Golestan Palace and the Nasir-ol-Molk Mosque among surviving examples.

The path ends at the meeting of East and West. The entry lists the Maiden Tower and the Palace of the Shirvanshahs in Baku, the Palace of the Shaki Khans and the Surakhany fire temple, and notes that even the Baku Metro stations have drawn notice for their lavish decor.