Posts by: KYOTO MACHIYA AIR

The last decade high-rise buildings have been scattered around Kyoto, while eating away whole blocks of machiya’s. Sometimes you’ll find one brave machiya standing strong between these giants. On one block a single machiya stands totally worn and torn, on another block as an elegant survivor. Between 1996-2003 13% of the machiya’s have been destroyed. With a rough but moderate calculation, this means that if this trend continues within 50 years we will have only some preserved machiya’s left. Visit Isjah’s main blog: http://isjah.com/survival-of-the-fittest/

We’ve appeared in The Kyoto Shimbum News, the local newspaper, today.   Visit Isjah’s main blog: http://isjah.com/in-the-news/

Last two weeks the Rakumachirakuya festival is being held throughout Kyoto. Activities ranging from a cooking class to an insight lecture into working with roof tiles are held in kyo-machiya’s to promote machiya culture. Some of the private machiya’s are opened which makes the festival a great way to see behind the otherwise closed doors. One of the workshops I visited was about making roofs. This is an extremely labour-intensive  process, from making the tiles (which is largely made and formed by hand) to placing the tiles on the roof. Not much has changed in the last century, except from the material (now mainly…

  The 京町家AIR2014 (kyo-machiya Artist in Residence 2014) kicked off on May 23rd with a welcome party at the Anewal Gallery. ‘t Japans Cultureel Centrum (JCC) and the Kyoto Center for Community Collaboration (KCCC), with support of Tozai travel, organise this programme to promote cultural exchange between Japan and the Netherlands. This summer Cesi Nolten and I are invited to stay in a kyo-machiya (an old townhouse) in Kyoto to experience Japanese life, the ‘machiya way’. Cesi is a visual and sound artist and will be collecting sounds to make a sound scape on Kyoto. I will be doing research on the preservation of the machiya way of life….