A Seat in the Palm: Japanese Building Workshop

Build a one tatami size Japanese tea house with us!

A Seat in the Palm (Japanese name: Tenohira-An 掌庵) is a collaboration between visiting Tokyo architect Fuminori Nousaku and Lecturer Dr Nancy Ji, supported by carpenter Roy Bertram and Nousaku Lab students Yura Moe and Saya Moriguchi. Drawing on traditional Japanese carpentry interpreted for contemporary times, we will make a small Japanese-style tea space the size of a single tatami mat, and we’d love you to build it with us.

Working in a small group, you’ll weave bamboo walls using the traditional takekomai technique, in which split bamboo is woven into a grid and bound with syuro rope to form a lath framework. You’ll also dye the timber roof boards with two natural pigments, kakishibu (fermented persimmon tannin) and ai (indigo).

No experience needed. Just curiosity and a willingness to get your hands dirty.

Event details

When: Saturday 7 November and Sunday 8 November, 10:00am to 3:00pm 
Places: Limited to 8 people per day 
Booking: Each day is a separate session. Please register for each day you’d like to attend. 
Cost: Free

Location will be shared with confirmed participants.

What to bring

Please wear closed-toe shoes and comfortable clothing you don’t mind getting dirty. Please bring building or work gloves if you have them.

About the design team

Nancy Yao Ji is an architect, educator and curator based in Naarm/Melbourne, and Lecturer in Architectural Design at the University of Melbourne. Her curatorial work includes Loose Fit: Provisional and Participatory Practices in East Asia (Design Gallery, University of Melbourne, with Dijia Chen and Alex Seo, 2026) and KOYA: Shed Architecture (Walsh Street House, Robin Boyd Foundation, with Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku, 2025). She holds a doctorate from Keio University and studied at the University of Auckland, the University of Melbourne, UC Berkeley and TU Delft.

Fuminori Nousaku studied architecture at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (now Institute of Science Tokyo) and earned his doctorate in 2012. After working with Njiric+ Arhitekti in Croatia, he founded Fuminori Nousaku Architects in 2010. The office works across architecture, art, installations, renovation and writing, and conducts research on architecture, urban environments and ecosystems in collaboration with his university laboratory. Major works include Takaoka Guesthouse (with Junpei Nousaku) and Holes in the House (with Mio Tsuneyama). His publications include WindowScape: Window Behaviorology (co-author, Film Art), Fuminori Nousaku: Edifice of the Wild (LIXIL Publishing) and, most recently, Urban Wild Ecology (co-authored with Mio Tsuneyama, TOTO Publishing, 2024).

Nousaku Fuminori Laboratory, Department of Architecture and Building Engineering, Institute of Science Tokyo, pursues an ecological vision for architecture. It explores actor-network-oriented design in response to human activity disrupting the balance of the global environment.

We are grateful for the support of the UNION Foundation for Ergodesign Culture and The Japan Foundation, Sydney.