Traditional Japanese architecture harmonically blends nature with the artificial. Using light, glossy wooden floors, garden ponds and paper screens, the outside enters the home through reflected light. Toshihito Endo sees this use of light reflection as humanity’s oldest attempt at virtual reality. Most modern cityscapes, however, inhibit this particular use of light. A smart digital window that opens to beautiful nature scenery aims to modernize this ancient virtual reality. Through vertically stacked blocks of glass, its light and colours reflect on the surrounding walls. It shows various nature scenes that you can match to the weather. Where technology can sometimes make us lose touch with the outside world, Toshihito sees an opportunity to help us reconnect with nature.
The project, "The Beauty of Time Passing" was presented at Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show in DDW (Oct. 21-29 2023, Heuvel Galerie, 5611 DK Eindhoven).
Photo by Nicole Marnati
Inspiration of this project is traditional Japanese archtecture. In some temples, you can find outside outside nature sceneries inside various materials such as shiny wooden floors or reflective table surfaces. They are originated from the actual nature environment, but once they get projected by sunlight and translated inside material, it gets reborn with new appearance. Such new sceneries are harmonically blended into the archtecture and become a part of it to create "a sense of nature" inside our living space and time.
Letting "a sense of nature" emerge inside the architecture doesn't merely mean to create a nature atomosphere or living nature feeling. It's about creating "a link" between our lives and actual nature environment by using real weather data such as weather condition or humidity. Sceneries inside the light reflections are not only controlled by human, but by nature itself. In other words, even though sceneries are fully digitally created, they reflect and lively connect to actual nature. This "virtual touch point of nature" approach enables to integrate nature as new form to our lives with maintaining one of the beautiful, but cruel aspects of nature, "uncontrollability".
