nic the intern presents white out - kubota arch
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By ro / lu in white out Published: Friday, 27 February 09 - 07:48 AM (GMT -06:00) Last Updated: Monday, 23 March 09 - 08:25 PM (GMT -06:00) |
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white out's an ongoing series of posts drawn from a presentation that our winter intern nicolas allinder gave about his research into recent modern residential japanese architecture.
tadao ando could design a perfect modern house. a place filled with sophistication and calculated design. his work is inherently high end due to its exclusivity. yet, his houses feel full of warmth, character and life. i would love to live in any of his peaceful houses.
maybe it’s the documentation, but f house feels almost unreal. every detail of this house seems exact, even the excessively crisp steel (i’m guessing) fence. it gets to the point where you can’t tell if this is a photograph or a rendering. rolu associate, mike brady is convinced the fence is a rendering. i want to believe it’s a real non-doctored photograph. whether or not, its precision gives off a cold empty feeling. viewing f house is kind of like fondling an overly expensive watch, you’re repulsed by the idea of something so small being so expensive, but you can't look away. the interior is just as pristine and intriguing as the exterior.
when i first unveiled these images to matt, he was, like everyone else, taken in by the façade. but after peeling away the exterior and revealing the interior, we immediately got into a discussion about the “slick” quality of the house. a house that tries to be modern and thus becomes characterless. he brought up the pernicious "60 minutes" correspondent morely safer. safer has been in many hotel rooms during his long tenure as a tv journalist. eventually he came to regard these places, which he painted, as basically characterless places, neither enticing or offensive. their neutrality renders them empty. after thinking about it, i remembered this eccentric french anthropologist marc auge who wrote about the concept of non-places; places that don’t seem to be “relational, historical or concerned with identity…” they are still decidedly places, but devoid of life, like a hotel room, shopping mall, airport lounge, etc. f house seems to be a non-place.
tadao ando filled his buildings with warmth and personality, even at in their most severe moments. kubota architects have obviously created a stunning structure in f house, but they forgot to make a home. maybe it’s the perfectly smooth concrete. or emptiness associated with a single bed tucked under a balcony in the back end of the house.
i do recommend checking out kubota architect ateliers work, his facades are clean, striking and structurally very provocative. but for me, there was relation, history and identity lacking in the interior.
posted by nicolas allinder - the intern
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