Chashitsu

The Tea Room at W&L

 
TEA ROOM ARCHITECTURE
 
The lavish tea gatherings of the Kamakura and Muromachi periods were held in formal reception rooms within the residences of the warrior elite. The growing emphasis at these parties on connoisseurship of precious works of art contributed to the adoption of the architectural style called shoin. Meaning literally “study,” the shoin style may have evolved from the study or “writing room” found in Zen monasteries. In palace architecture, it refers to a room with a writing alcove for a low desk, staggered shelves for artistically arranged books and tea utensils, and another alcove, later called the tokonoma, with a platform for the display of precious objects and works of art.
 
With the rise of interest in the wabi style of tea in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, tea gatherings moved out of residential buildings into separate, specially designed teahouses. Rikyū popularized an architectural style called sōan, meaning literally “grass hut.” The sōan teahouse was a small, rustic structure of bamboo, wood, and thatch built in a garden setting. Its simplicity expressed the ideals of wabi tea, according to which the tea ceremony was an occasion to withdraw from material and worldly concerns. The nijiriguchi, the low entrance way designed by Rikyū, required that all guests, no matter their rank, crawl inside where they became social equals. The interior design included the tokonoma of shoin architecture, but reduced to a small recess with only a slightly raised platform or none at all. The spare decorations were limited to flowers and a hanging scroll bearing a painting or calligraphic verses.

This text appeared in a brochure entitled Japan: The Art of the Tea Ceremony, which was produced in conjunction with the exhibition “Japan: The Shaping of the Daimyo Culture 1185-1868” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
 

The Tearoom in the Reeves Center at Washington and Lee

incorporates many features of the shoin style tea room.