The Lattice's Relaxed Proportion vs. the Strict Division of Line and Plane

The last piece looked at the mechanics built into Korean changho, eogeum-yukmo and gyo-sal, and the meaning carried inside them.

On top of that, this piece looks at the visual form each country arrived at: proportion, and how the surface is divided.

People see a neat, modern beauty in the shoji's evenly ruled grid. Where that evenness came from, and why Korean changho went another way, is the question here.

A Korean changho didn't just fill the frame evenly with slats. Within one door panel, the top and the bottom were divided differently.

1. The shelter of meoreum and gungchang: At the bottom of a Korean door there's a gungchang, a panel closed off with a thick board, or a meoreum supporting the bottom of the frame. It isn't decoration. It's structure, and it's a measurement.
   A Korean changho was the outer wall between the courtyard and the room. People lived on the floor, sitting and lying down. If the whole door were thin slats and paper, the body would be open to every outside eye and knock.
   So makers closed off the bottom with a thick board, up to the height of a person sitting or lying down, and let light and wind in above it. The height of a meoreum is also a comfortable height to rest an arm on when you sit in the room.
   The line that divides the surface is set by the human body.
2. Room for the eye to rest: Korean lattice sometimes leaves the middle open and weaves only the top and bottom tightly, varying the slat spacing with the use of the room. The change in spacing from line to line gives the eye a rhythm to rest on.

The Japanese shoji also has a version with a board at the bottom: the koshiita (腰板) of the koshitsuki shoji (腰付障子).

But one of its main jobs is to protect the paper from tearing during cleaning and everyday movement. Its height, too, is set within the tatami module and the fitting's standard sizes.

As an earlier piece showed, the shoji was a movable partition set inside, behind the amado and the corridor that already filtered the outside. It never had to shield a body from outside impact. Standardizing it into even divisions that could be made in quantity and swapped out made sense.

So the bottom panels look alike, but for different reasons.

The shoji's koshiita is a protective strip within a standard size. The Korean meoreum and gungchang are structural parts that start from the height of a body sitting or lying down.

The same goes for the grid. The shoji's equal divisions are a standard proportion, born of the module and of swapping parts. The variation in Korean lattice is a body's proportion, starting from a person sitting, leaning, and looking.

Japan got a neat consistency from standardized order. Korea, standing on a boundary that faced the outside directly, pushed and pulled lines and panels to protect the body and rest the eye.

Neither is the other's failure. The door simply stood in a different place.