This paper examines the carpenter’s staff, a wooden notational instrument used in traditional East Asian timber construction to record and transmit dimensional information for the fabrication and assembly of structural frames. Marked with inked inscriptions corresponding to joints and component positions, the staff enabled master carpenters to coordinate construction without the use of scaled drawings. Drawing on fieldwork in southern China together with historical texts and visual sources, the study introduces the staff as both a practical construction tool and an epistemological device. The paper situates the instrument within broader debates on architectural representation through a deliberately asymmetrical dialogue with Western theories of notation and mapping. Reframing the staff as a form of “wood map,” the study examines how its full-scale inscriptions operate simultaneously as notation, operational guide, and archival record of construction knowledge. The staff thus reveals a mode of architectural specification in which representation, material judgement, and construction remain inseparable.
Adam Brillhart (Fri,) studied this question.