All dressed up with nowhere to go? LAVA's most recent speculative project makes over the UTS Tower. Courtesy LAVA

LAVA knows how to use architectural membranes in innovative ways and their recent proposal to cover up the UTS Tower in a dress of high performance composite mesh textile is no exception. Called Tower Skin, the speculative project is in response to a Sydney Morning Herald article that asked Sydneysiders to nominate the ugliest buildings in Sydney. The skin would generate energy with photovoltaic cells and collect rain, among other things, as well as being used as a media surface for communicating performances and campus events in real time. Christo would be proud. LAVA’s Giant Digital Origami Tigers installation is on show in the Customs House Square, Forecourt, from this Thursday until 14 March. Not quite as ambitious as the UTS dress, it should be a crowd-pleaser nonetheless.

Linda Hughes, Wing Brooch, Red & White Series, 2009, laminate and acrylic. Photography Argonaut Design

Jeweller Linda Hughes takes inspiration from the way stripes on hazard signs scream danger and attention in her latest exhibition Metonymy - Look Both Ways. Coming up at Craft Victoria, Melbourne, from 29 April until 12 June, Hughes explores the visual language that stripes evoke when placed on the body as jewellery. The work explores the tension between body and environment, and critiques the complex theatre of public space.

The following is an extract from David Neustein’s review of Sou Fujimoto’s House N.

“Fujimoto is a man devoted to the idea of reducing architecture down to its essential qualities, which makes for some complicated living arrangements. The most extreme of his experimental propositions, Final Wooden House, is a small weekender constructed from solid 350mm square-profile cedar blocks. Occupants must shift and twist their way through the liminal space between the massive blocks. The architect overtly expects his clients to adapt to the house, not the other way around.

 The inhabitants of House N, a retired couple, approached Fujimoto well aware of his radical tendencies. The architect did not disappoint with his design. Described as a ‘box in a box in a box’, House N comprises three skins, painted white, nested within each other like babushka dolls. Large, square openings punch through these layers, bringing light and air into the innermost rooms and interpenetrating adjacent spaces. Formed in concrete, the outermost of the boxes occupies the full extent of the site. Between this outermost layer and the next is a space containing furniture and trees, partially exposed to the street.”

 
Tony Chenchow from Sydney-based Chenchow Little interviews Sou Fujimoto in Monument 95. Extracted from that interview, the question below allows Fujimoto to explain some of the process behind his creation of a domestic space.

“Tony Chenchow: House N and House Before House are both white houses. The method of construction and its materiality are not visible. My interpretation is that abstraction here involves a process of reduction or ‘stripping away’. In House O and the model for the Garden House, the walls express the materiality and construction: the concrete and the lines of the formwork are visible. Can you discuss the two different approaches to abstraction, materiality and construction.

Sou Fujimoto: We feel that white is very much a material, and we try to utilise its properties in many different ways as much as possible. In the case of House N, we felt the architecture to exist like a cloud, seeing pieces of the sky in layers. The presence of the architecture here is taken to the background as an instrument to mediate the filtering of the light and the many views.

House Before House, on the other hand, prepares the site with fields of canvas for the trees to acrobatically fuse the notion of nature and architecture by its configuration and the orientation suggested by each of the boxes.

We envisaged the walls of House O and House Garden as being rather like a continuation of the cliff edge or the garden. Both of the approaches dissolve the architecture to make apparent the spatial relationships and dialogues within the space.”

We haven’t found anyone that hates this house yet, and like most of Fujimoto's work it’s thoroughly engaging. Would we like to live in it? Possibly not, but it leaves the door open for a discussion on the nature of domestic space. What are your thoughts? Post a comment below or email us.

House N floor plan. Courtesy Sou Fujimoto Architects.
Short section through garden, kitchen and dining space. Courtesy Sou Fujimoto Architects. 



White, curious, and peculiar, could this be the house of the future? Blinded by the white of House N we couldn’t resist putting this in: Blob VB3, a mobile space unit designed by Belgian architectural firm dmvA, looks like a giant egg. Open up its shell though and you’ll find the contents of a home, complete with bathroom, kitchen, lighting, bed and several niches for storage. It’s easily transportable and can also be used as an office, guestroom or garden house. We want one!

The illuminated Blob VB3. Photography Rini van Beek/Mick Couwenbergh