11.05.2008

A giant game of Jenga



Looking at images of the model for the "Final Wooden House" by Sou Fujimoto, it looks as though the designers were having a great laugh by playing a XXL version of the game "Jenga": a stacking of equal sized wooden blocks, of which some are removed, for whatever reason. It's not funny like "haha", but it's looks as though it's main motive has been conceptual fun.

That is: until one sees the interior of the actually built building. It's not just wood as a building material, or wood as a finish, but it's actually wood reduced to it's essence of being wood. It defies the traditional concept of what a material is (or could be): the structure IS the material.
Other than that, the building defies all traditional ideas of floors, ceilings and walls. Everything is everything. Material is distributed three-dimensionally, space is distributed three-dimensionally, and thus usage and people are scattered around the volume. What appears to be a joke is actually a spot-on composition of complex simplicity.


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