House without walls - an artistic highlight of the versatility of wood

We are very used to the presence of wood all around us in various forms, as furniture, flooring, ceilings, doors, windows. But for wood to take all these forms, shifting from one to another according to need, I don't think that's common. Yet such a place exists in the form of a house built entirely of cedar wood. It's a bungalow, a small house, primitive and yet futuristic at the same time, built from beams stacked endlessly. The end result is a totally atypical place where everything can be anything: chair, bed, wall, window.

A construction that highlights the versatility of wood

The idea comes from the architecture studio I am Fujimoto Architects and takes wood's versatility as its starting point. In conventional architecture, we find wood in buildings in the form of load-bearing structures and beams, but also as walls, floors, ceilings, furniture, doors and windows. Japanese designers thought to go the other way around, to the essence. They put wood into a single form that embodies all its uses. It's actually a marriage of the philosophy of wood in its essence with architecture.

The cedar beams used in the construction have a special impact. They go beyond the idea of wood and become existence itself. Each side of the beams is 35 cm wide, a size that fits the human body. So you can sleep, sit, live on them. It is a return to the essence that only Japanese culture can do, can think. It is the symbol of wood just as the stone or the cherry blossom becomes the symbol of the garden.

In the beam house there is no place with a clear purpose. You cannot say this is the floor, this is the ceiling, look, here we have the walls. The place that was the floor can become a chair or a bed. Everything can be looked at from different perspectives, levels are relative, and people reinterpret space according to the needs of the moment.

Here, the conventional rules of architecture are overturned. There are no plans, no point of stability. And all thanks to the versatility of wood. No other material could undergo so many illusory transformations. Because no other material can be a building, a load-bearing structure, insulation, furniture and finishes all at the same time.

This bungalow is no longer just architecture. It is the wood itself, the essential wood, the total wood, which goes beyond the idea of architecture and construction, becoming a space of existence.