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Floating structures & environmental awareness
Taking on the site and situation in the water-basin, as a starting point, the newly formed Floating University will focus on environmental awareness through caring for relationships, situations and the places in which technologies, ecologies and humans meet. A diverse programme will invite the wider public to inhabit the site by being together and forming lasting human and non-human bonds.
http://www.floatinguniversity.org/en/
HEIDEGGER'S HUT
JAPANESE TINY HOUSE MOVEMENT:
Architect Hosaka Takeshi created a house called “Inside Out” that is nearly completely open to the surrounding nature. The bedroom and bathroom are enclosed in separate boxes on the ground floor. The living room/kitchen sits on top of the boxes and is completely open to the outdoors, though sliding glass doors can be closed during bad weather. At first the Matsumotos had trouble understanding Takeshi’s Swiss-cheese style home design (both the walls and ceiling are littered with openings), but over time they have fallen in love with the space where nature seeps inside. Rain, snow, wind, bugs, birds all enter the space.
On a site 3.3 meters wide and 10 meters deep, architect Takeshi Hosaka planned a dream home for himself and his wife Megumi. Leaving the ceiling open to the sky, the main space of the home “is not inside and is not outside”. Takeshi and Megumi spend most of their time in the open air- only closing the sliding glass walls only during winter. Without the glass, there’s no wall to separate the couple from the elements and a sheer drop to the first floor.
Can a place change how we think? “At most a city-dweller gets ‘stimulated’ by a so-called ‘stay in the country’, wrote German philosopher Martin Heidegger. “But my whole work is sustained and guided by the world of these mountains and their people.”
Measuring 6 by 7 meter, Heidegger’s hut in the Black Forest wasn’t a work of architecture, but rather a typical, simple mountain cabin. In 1922 Heidegger was a popular university lecturer in Freiburg, Germany, but he hadn’t written anything big yet. That was the year he made the first of his escapes to the mountains where he would eventually do most of his most important writing, and thinking.
Without running water or electricity, the hut provided a permeability with the outside world that prompted Heidegger’s deep thinking on the nature of being, authenticity and the fundamental importance of our engagement with the world.
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