The Final Wooden House by Sou Fujimoto must be the epitome of good environmental design, but at the same time it is amazingly impractical unless you’re a Hobbit and live in The Shire!

Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto designed the wooden bungalow to be small and primitive. The design is meant to highlight the versatility of lumber.

In an ordinary wooden architecture, lumber is effectively differentiated according to functions in various localities precisely because it is so versatile. Columns, beams, foundations, exterior walls, interior walls, ceilings, floorings, insulations, furnishings, stairs, window frames, meaning all, says Fujimoto. However, I thought if lumber is indeed so versatile then why not create architecture by one rule that fulfills all of these functions. I envisioned the creation of new spatiality that preserves primitive conditions of a harmonious entity before various functions and roles differentiated.

Using large beams of 350 mm square profile cedar and piled on top of one another, Fujimoto created the walls, ceiling, floors and built in nooks. This leaves no definitive lines between each of the structure’s components, thus blending the entire interior of the space together. The function of the small home is defined by how the user adapts to the wood structure. The house is meant to bring a kind of harmony between the built environment and the way the human body behaves within the space.

I thought of making an ultimate wooden architecture. It was conceived by just mindlessly stacking 350mm square.

(Click on the images to see a larger view)

Fujimoto continues, There are no separations of floor, wall, and ceiling here. A place that one thought was a floor becomes a chair, a ceiling, a wall from various positions. The floor levels are relative and spatiality is perceived differently according to one’s position. Here, people are distributed three-dimensionally in the space. This is a place like an amorphous landscape with a new experience of various senses of distances. Inhabitants discover, rather than being prescribed, various functionalities in these convolutions.

 

Architects: Sou Fujimoto Architects
Location: Kumamoto, Japan
Photographer: Iwan Baan