Inhabitat – Green Design, Innovation, Architecture, Green Building Kengo Kuma Creates a Dynamic Cave-Like Interior Using 2,000 Pieces of Wood

Starbucks Cafe, Kengo Kuma, wood interiors, fukuoka japan, sustainable design, green architecture, green design

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Kengo Kuma and Associates have given a Starbucks coffee shop in Fukuoka, Japan an imaginative re-design using 2,000 wooden sticks. Each stick varies in length from between 1.3 – 4 meters, but if laid out in a straight line they would stretch 4.4 The the

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Kengo Kuma and Associates’s interior celebrates the warm grain of natural unfinished wood.

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They had to find a way to avoid aligning too many of the pieces of wood at a single point.

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Through careful positioning they constructed a woven mass of wooden segments that form a cave-like space.

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The team built the web-like cafe interior near Dazaifu Tenmangu, one of the country’s principle shrines.

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The nearby shrine is a sacred spot that dates all the way back to 919 A.D.

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The shrine receives about 2 million visitors a year.