Wednesday, February 24, 2010

House of the Floating Angel

Well, it's actually House H by Tokyo architect Sou Fujimoto, in one of a series of photographs by Iwan Baan. In the interview below from 0300TV, Fujimoto uses his book, Primitive Future, to help illustrate his ideas about design.

He cites Le Corbu and Mies as two primary influences on his work, Mies concept of architecture represented by Fujimoto as the stave's of a musical score, without any notes, which finds its counterpoint in the facing page with Fujimoto's cluster of tunes liberated from stave's.

A house by Corbu is likened to a nest - precisely arranged and fabricated. Fujimoto's preference in his own work is the idea of a cave, an existing, more random space, in which the inhabitant carves out his own place.
You can see the idea personified in the above photo of Fujimoto's Final Wooden House, which has something of the quality of a Jenga set, and puts me in mind of Ken Isaac's Microhouses of a half century before.
Fujimoto's House H, itself, is an amalgam of the serene and the surreal. Built in crowded Tokyo, it forgoes the usual courtyard for a relationship of large openings, exterior and interior, floor and ceiling, that blur the edges between outside and in, "boxes in boxes" bridged by a succession of wooden stairways that, in one case, goes absolutely nowhere, Escher via LeCorbusier.
In Baan's photographs, the house appears scarcely occupied, devoid of possessions. The family living there seems almost adrift in the large spaces and their bleached white walls and ceilings, Miesian stave's devoid of notes. The absence of particulars, the steep multi-leveling that seems anything but child friendly, remind us of the close co-habitation between the unsettling and the sublime.

Sou Fujimoto Interview / Sou Fujimoto Architects / Part 2 from 0300TV on Vimeo.

2 comments:

Storage Sheds guy said...

Oh boy that Wooden House is really something, so unique.

iphone said...

this is very creative house i hope if you can re upload the video too with my great thanks