Spread Your Wings – Asymmetry in Eastern Designs

This is an excerpt from our newest book “Good Eye” by Jim Tolpin and George Walker.

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Like their counterparts in the West, traditional artisans in China, Korea and Japan understood symmetry and used it extensively in their designs. By symmetry, we mean creating designs that display a mirror image both left and right. Symmetry is found throughout nature and universally admired in the beauty of a human face.

Examples abound from the East of architecture and furniture that employed symmetry to lead the eye and create a harmonious aesthetic. This common mastery of symmetry perhaps contributed to the European embrace of furniture designs from China in the 18th century.

Yet, there was something quite different developing in design from Japan: the use of asymmetry. One of the best ways to understand it is to think about the sand gardens that are sometimes called Zen gardens. The carefully raked sand is a small ocean, and off to one end an island of rock juts up from the waves. It’s a visual surprise by which our eyes cannot help but be captivated.

Asymmetry employed in this fashion imparts a sense of surprise and wonder. It can give a design a lift in an unexpected place, sort of like cruising along a smooth highway and driving over a bump. Not a bump that jars the suspension but enough to awaken your senses. Japanese furniture makers employed asymmetry along two different paths – simple and complex asymmetry. Simple asymmetry is uniform, like that sand ocean in the garden, with one element of surprise sprouting up to complement the design. Consider a simple chest of drawers, with a bank of drawers laid out in a regular symmetrical pattern, with one unexpected asymmetrical drawer or door to add a bit of the unexpected.

Let’s take a look at a traditional tansu chest that employs this use of asymmetry. One of the hallmarks of this type of asymmetry is how powerfully it captures the eye immediately. When you look at the piece at top right (above), did you find your eye pulled to that small asymmetrical door in the lower corner?

Let’s take a look at what lies beneath this traditional tansu chest of drawers.

Simple Asymmetry – Form

The governing form is a square that sits inside the sides, top and base at the bottom of the case. The drawer configuration actually tricks the eye and it’s not apparent that this is built around a simple square.

Simple Asymmetry – Define

The artisan divided the height of the square into three equal parts, and that bottom part gives us the module and also the height of the bottom drawer. They used that module to divide up the two bottom drawers into a pattern of proportional asymmetry. The width of the longer bottom drawer (two parts), along with the width of the small door (one part) is the asymmetrical spark in the design.

Simple Asymmetry – Refine

The height of the base uses the height of three of the horizontal dividers, stepped off to size the heavier base at the bottom. The heights of the top three drawers occupy the top two parts of our square form. These drawers are graduated. We cover this method for adjusting drawer height in more detail in chapter 7.

Contemporary Design Inspired by Simple Asymmetry

This simple use of asymmetry has several lessons for the contemporary builder. First, we can take a symmetrical design and add a bit of delight by introducing one small element of asymmetry. This small element can stand out due to its unusual size. But it can also stand out with a variety of visual treatments that captivate the eye. That asymmetrical drawer or door could also be an open space instead of closed. Or the door or drawer face could be a different kind of wood. The overall case and drawers might be made entirely of cherry, and one asymmetrical drawer might be made of maple. The asymmetrical element could also display a different texture. Finally, and possibly the most captivating visually, is to employ something like that island jutting up in the midst of our sand sea. By that we mean employing a design with a uniform background and inserting an unexpected island.

At right (below) is a mirror frame with a small shelf to hold keys and other small items in a foyer or entryway. The frame is a “floater,” which means the mirror is centered inside the frame with a gap, so a dark shadowline surrounds the mirror itself. The small asymmetric drawer could be a different wood or have a different texture than the adjacent open space.

Complex Asymmetry

The second way these artisans employed asymmetry is more complex. By that we mean that they used asymmetry to drive the entire design. This use of asymmetry is not so much to display a subtle surprise. Instead, it’s used to give a design a distinct look or personality. Let’s look at a complex asymmetrical design, a stair-step tansu chest.

When you first look at the chest at right (below), what do you see? Is it the stair steps that rise up? Can you see how the different elements in the design vary in both height and width? This is how this use of asymmetry is so captivating visually.

When we look at this design, there are a few elements that are a mirror image, but taken as a whole, this is not a design governed by symmetry. Oddly enough, the square drawer on the top and its mirror image on the bottom are separated diagonally from each other at the extreme ends of the design. If you look closely at the proportions and the diagonal lines in Jim’s deconstruction, it’s clear that this was designed around simple proportions and geometry. Yet, it’s a collection of dissimilar elements assembled together with its own unique personality.

Complex Asymmetry – Form

Similar to the earlier chest, this one is built around a square – but it is not obvious due to the overall stairstep configuration that grabs the viewer’s attention. The overall height from the bottom of the lower drawers to the top of the case is divided into four parts to establish the module.

Complex Asymmetry – Define

All the major elements of the design are either fractions or multiples of our module. The lower drawers are one-half module in height. One-fifth a module defines the width of the dividers, two-fifths gives the height of the base. Module segments define the steps rise and run.

Contemporary Design Inspired by Complex Asymmetry

Complex use of asymmetry also has some lessons for the contemporary builder. It offers the possibility that an entire design can employ asymmetry using simple proportions and geometric shapes. Many combinations of asymmetrical pairings can be employed along with mirror-image symmetrical elements sprinkled throughout a design. With that in mind, let’s take a look at an asymmetrical design inspired by a mid-century modern design by Charles Hayward.

It begins with form, governed by a rectangle that’s a simple six parts high by seven parts wide. One sixth the height is the module.

The front elevation has an asymmetrical layout in the configuration of the large doors. The full length door is three modules wide, and the pair of shorter symmetrical doors combine to occupy four modules of the horizontal space. These four modules also govern the overall length of the two upper drawers. The case sits one-and-a-half modules off the floor. The drawers are one-module high.

This design employed a secondary module to size the widths of the two asymmetrical drawers at the top of the case. The secondary module is based on dividing four parts into three spacings and giving the width of the smaller drawer one part.

Going Deeper with Proportions

We’ve looked at some ways designs can be organized with simple whole-number proportions. In some of our examples, we’ve looked at using a secondary module. The use of a secondary module was actually quite common in traditional work but no group of artisans had a better grasp of its use than the Shakers. Perhaps that’s why their designs have such a universal appeal. In our next chapter, we’ll take a closer look at some Shaker work and how they used a secondary module to give their designs a spark.