house NA, by sou fujimoto
this house, by sou fujimoto, is incredible (as his houses usually are).
sou fujimoto makes me think of zygmunt bauman, that said that modernity nowadays is far away from the totalitarianism of orwell, 1984, the fascists etc. that we found in the beginning of the 20th century, in reality as well as in fiction.
bauman said that what we are witnessing (with facebook etc) is not the pervasive invasion of the state in the lives of private individuals, as one could see in orwell’s big brother televised figure. on the contrary, it is the invasion of what used to be the public realm by the very private lives of certain individuals (celebrities ?) in a large scale, and by almost everyone with a high-speed connection and the desire to broadcast, in a lesser way.
this house, by fujimoto, as others he’s designed, makes me think of a kind of backwards voyeurism. instead of slightly peeking into the intimacy of your neighbours (as in hitchcock’s rear window), what we do is we simply exhibit/project our own private lives (or lack of) to the neighbourhood.
Rudy Ricciotti said, once, that ‘glass and transparency’ are the most authoritarian materials in building. I think he was being provocative, and I guess he might be referring to the german parliament by norman foster. This is the fall of the public man, staged as in a play. is the disappearence of the house the last frontier between our private and public selves ? what happens when all we have is glass ? and what happens after that ?
for a lot more images of this project, including people actually living inside, please click here.
