Last week an online call was put out by Rome's MAXXI museum promising the first five architecture students to respond a chance to travel to Rome and build a model of Sou Fujimoto's latest project. The five selected entrants started on their work at MAXXI on Monday and their experience is being broadcast over the course of this week in a series of photos and videos detailing the ups, downs, opinions and thoughts of the students as they work.
Read more about the model and exhibition after the break...
The students, who are aged twenty-two to thirty-one and hail from all over Italy, will spend this week working on the model for Fujimoto's project Energy Forest - a conceptual, forest-inspired, fueling station of the future. When completed, the polycarbonate model will be hung by cables, and will measure about three meters wide and almost two metres tall, while containing over 3,500 scale figures, 800 sets of furniture, and 100 trees, all of which will need to be glued on by the students.
The model is being constructed for the exhibition Energy - oil and post-oil architecture and grids, which will open in Rome on March 22nd, and will focus on on the important link between architecture, energy and the environment. Fujimoto's futuristic forest fuel-station is one of seven proposals, all specifically designed for the exhibition, which explore how architecture can shape new ways in which energy can be distributed. A second part of the exhibition will contain a photographic display by three Italian photographers on the relationship between landscape and energy, while a third section delves into Italy's post-war history of road architecture.
If you would like to see the model taking shape, you can follow the progress of the students throughout the week on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr or Instagram.
