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

dream house

[(Anonymous)]

when I was little, I had fantasy about riverhouse, like beaver's nest.
I went to a river near my house, and made a flat bubble like nest that
I could stay inside easily. after I left, I was hoping that beavers will
come and start to live there. there were no beavers in the river
but I thought there were.
when I saw acconci's river float structure, I remembered about
my dream beaver house.
now my dream is to have a tree house for nap room, and riverhouse
for sorking my feet in the summer time. it will be nice, if house can be
like little cell bubbles connected and spread in the forest near river.
I would plant some mugwort near treehouse so I can have good dreams!

Re: dream house

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I know who you are! Hello H!