Tea in the trees

[imomus]

The building you see to the right is my current favourite structure, favourite public place, favourite built poem, favourite reproach to the ugliness of our built environments. It's the Ichiya-Tei (One-Night Teahouse), designed and built by Terunobu Fujimori in 2003. Terunobu is a 60 year-old architect and academic (he teaches at Tokyo University) who didn't start building until he was in his 40s. Before that he seems to have spent his time photographing accidental roadside architecture, admiring huts of various kinds, influencing Atelier Bow Wow, teaching and writing.

Terunobu took the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale by storm when he turned the Japanese pavilion in the Giardini into a room full of wattle and weave huts with leaves poking out all over them. You may recognize his 2004 Too-High Teahouse, a teahouse which is also a treehouse, from Click Opera's back pages.



I'll let Icon magazine pick up the story:

"Amid the wall-to-wall statistics and urban planning diagrams – the Biennale’s theme was “the city”– the Japanese Pavilion was a delightful relief, albeit one straight out of left field. Here were oddly shaped houses sprouting leeks or dandelions and models of tea rooms carved out of tree stumps

"Fujimori’s more recent buildings embrace more wholeheartedly the imaginative potential of ancient structures for contemporary times. Buildings such as the Akino Fuku Art Museum (1997), the Futo-an pottery workshop (2001) and the Lamune hot spring house (2005) are inspired by an incredibly diverse set of influences: 6th-century Japanese temples, the Neolithic stones of Callanish in Scotland, European thatched cottages and Malian rammed-earth mosques.

“The Japanese tradition is in some ways mature,” says Fujimori, “but I’m interested in the period before this tradition became established. I believe that for humans all over the world the basic gesture was the hut, and this was the same everywhere before distinctive architectural styles emerged.”



"The most interesting aspects of cities and the most compelling buildings are not the product of architects. The smooth surfaces and clinical thinking representative of first modernism and now digital design, as far as Fujimori is concerned, lack essential character."

You can say that again. Let's climb a tree for a cup of tea.

Comments

almost everywhere i guess

[(Anonymous)]

In Lunigiana, a region in the north of Tuscany, where I used to live some time, farmers have built stalls on their land, made of all the waste products you can think of, ranging from doors, to beds, crates, cupboards, tables, sink plates, whatever. I think they are among the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. A friend of mine, architect and local politician, shares this view.

Somehow I think that there is a direct lineage between these farmers buildings (the structures must go back centuries) and buildings by Lloyd Wright or Vanderrohe.

The architect and I have promised to each other to go on tour one day in the U.S. of A to discover how right we are.

In the meantime I will look up at trees, and wonder why Mr Fujimoro can't built tea houses in a few of the so many trees here in Berlin, in stead of having to bring them to a creative man's cemetery like the venice biennale.

greetings from the near east of Berlin,

rinus