final wooden house sou fujimoto architects
kumamoto 2008
innovatively primitive In this experimental house in Kumamoto in southern Japan, the constructions, facade, and interior are all made of wood. Its architect, Sou Fujimoto, thus calls the building, located in the garden of a private client on a lot measuring 4.20 by 4.20 meters, Final Wooden House. Building an all-wood house appealed to the Tokyo architect for several reasons. First, the material dominated Japanese architecture for centuries and had a great influence on the evolution of the country’s architecture. Second, there was its naturalness, which predestined it to shape the “primitive� architecture Fujimoto sought. Finally, the architect
was fascinated by the diversity of the material, which in one building can fulfill every conceivable function from dressing by way of construction and insulation to interior finishing. With his Final Wooden House, he pushed the multifunctionality of wood to its limits by assigning nearly all the tasks to a single element: thirty-five-centimeterthick square cedar beams. The viewer notices in passing that this is a living, growing material simply from its growth rings. Staggering the arrangement of the solid wood beams results in steps whose heights are multiples of the basic unit of thirty-five centimeters 57