It is well understood that the external appearance of any vernacular dwelling is an expression of the various factors that make up its local environment and culture, be that climate, material and technological availability, economic conditions, social and legal codes, and so on. Of course, the evolution of a dwelling’s interior is likewise influenced by the same things; but perhaps less often recognised is that the unfixed contents of the dwelling are also vessels of these factors, and so can have equally significant effects on the internal planning and ‘occupational style’ of the dwelling, even when they may have seemingly little to do with architecture.

These effects may be more evident in traditional or historical vernacular dwellings, but they are also present in our own modern houses, though over-familiarity might make them less obvious to us. Carpet, for example, is an ancient technology, but wall-to-wall fitted carpet only really became feasible after the invention of the vacuum cleaner. There is a modern tendency to think that our things are the way they are because we know better than the people of the past, when we are simply responding, often passively or reflexively, to the particular conditions of our time, just as our ancestors did. In the case of architecture, because buildings can become ‘stranded’ by lasting much longer than the conditions that gave rise to them, it is easy to forget that elements of their design that may strike us today as illogical or irrational probably made perfect sense when they were built. Conversely, the conditions of our own time have made possible certain designs and living arrangements that would have been impractical or nonsensical before these conditions existed.

The subject of the next several posts — the bedrooms (shinshitsu 寝室), sleeping spaces (nema 寝間), and sleeping places (shinjo 寝所) of minka — provides, in the story of the evolution of these spaces, an excellent example of the kind of effects that material and technological developments, as manifested in domestic objects — in this case bedding (shingu 寝具) — can have on the internal development of a dwelling.