FORHAVE EXHIBITION by KATOxVictoria

MODEL EXPLANATION

CULTIVATED NATURE (mockup 1:1).

The concept was developed for the solo exhibition at Leth & Gori to express our attitude towards creation in a naïve and simple way.

This house consists of 4 trees and a minimal iron structure keeping each other standing.Nature and culture is leaning on each other to create a place of just 1 m2.

This mockup was built in collaboration with QSmejden in Christiania and pillows have been provided by Bolia.

EXHIBITION TABLE (model 1:1).

This is a table we developed specifically for this exhibtion. You can see the models from many directions. At one time we are connecting our ideas and approach and sepperating the individual expressions of each concept.

LUCKY HOUSE (model 1:50).

This project is a renovation project for an “allotment garden house” / et “kolonihavehus” in the outskirts of Copenhagen.

Today Lucky House is a temporary solution comprising two rather big old sheds. With this project we wanted to re explore the original spirit of “colony garden houses” which express a specific “happiness of minimal things”. We felt that our job was not to invent something new here, but rather to redistribute what was already there; spaciously and material wise.

We chopped up the programs into mono functional rooms and distributed them throughout the garden. Today the house and the garden are two much separated entities but in this way garden pockets take shape around and in-between the houses where everyday life can spill out and connect the house in a continuous flow.

We reuse to material from the existing Lucky House; the classic black painted wooden facades with the crooked white window frames will be cut and reassembled according to the new layout.

GLASS OF GLASS TEA PAVILION (model 1:20).

This is our winning entry for a competition organized by AAF and Asahi Glass Company. The pavilion was later built as a 1:1 mockup in the AGC Studio 2012.

The participants of the competition were asked to propose an idea for 1:1 scale pavilion that would expand the possibilities of glass architecture.

We thought of the intangible space of the forest and the mysterious fluid nature of glass could crystallize into something spacious, so we made a house of trees interwoven by curved glass.

In this way we could challenge some general notion of glass; Instead of treating glass as a method to reach transparency or the illusion of nothingness, we looked for a way to express “glass of glass”.

“Glass of glass” Tea Pavilion is a lively existence in nature, made by a material which has a solid surface of moving reflections and bended light.

OSAKA GARDEN TOWER (model 1:55).

This tower is an abstraction on an exhibition theme of “What to do after the Higashi nihon daishinsai Earthquake of 2011 in Japan?”.

We were working on Lucky House before this exhibition and thought that introducing the Colony-garden-house mantra of “richness of small” could define a new architectural interpretation of wealth in times of scarce space and resources.

Can we gather “minimalness” so it becomes a new bigness?. Osaka Garden Tower is a three dimensional reinterpretation of the traditional Danish “colony gardenhouse”. It is an image of how a colony garden house could look in a tropical, humid and urban Japanese context.

Osaka Garden Tower grows several stories intertwined with breezy shadow gardens and sunny flower terraces with curtains of hanging plants. The housing units consist of 3x3m square and triangular cubes which create a spacious tower where everybody’s roof s somebody else’s garden.

BLUE SAKURA (model 1:30).

We build this foam sculpture to promote a new isolation material for DOW Japan at the Japan Architectural Material Fair in Tokyo 2012.

The sculpture measured 3 x 11 x 4 meters build entirely of “Styrofoam EX” and included a small hidden office, a construction mockup and presentation material, ipads and samples.

We have been frustrated for some time about the lack of isolation in Japanese houses. We are dying in the summer and winter and spending too much electricity on heaters and air conditioners. With this collaboration we helped communicate the necessity and different methods of isolating houses.

The stand stood for only 2 days and then disappeared like “sakura” (cherry blossom). We donated scrap material as model material to architectural offices in Tokyo.

NORWEGIAN WOOD (model 1:100).

This is our proposal for the Norwegian Våler Church competition of November 2011 with Alexandria Algard.

The original church was destroyed in a fire in 2009 and our main objective in this project was to treat the church space as if it had never really disappeared.

Even though the physical structure of the church burned down, we trust the space where people said goodbye to their loved ones, named their newborns and started on a path with a chosen one; this void must still stand clear for the inhabitants of Våler inner eye.

The proposal “Norwegian Wood” is but a wooden structure outlining and protecting the constant original Våler Church space, in his way the Church Space re-emerges like a clearing in a crystallized forest.

The open and transparent timber structure of the new Våler Church makes space for a new closeness to the nature and the surroundings. Rather than an enclosed building for Christian worship, the new Våler Church is a modern church; an open plaza, a view-tower and meeting place for everybody.

FORREST TOWER (model 1:20).

This is an imaginary project for a retail shop in Tokyo that we are in the process of presenting.

The house is composed like a stack of forests, each level functioning as shop spaces, a changing room level and an event terrace.

You can climb the building like a giant tree though winding staircases finding clothes accidentally hanging on and between trees like a play of hide and seek.