in:situ 2015 - Sou Fujimoto

Sou Fujimoto
in:situ - The 2015 New Zealand Institute of Architects Conference
Introduction by Professor Andrew Barrie
Tuesday,10 February 2015
Supported by Dulux
Catalogue text:

Sou Fujimoto was born in Hokkaido in 1971, graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1994, and established his own office in Tokyo in 2000. In 2012 he was a member of Japan’s Gold Lion-winning team at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and his practice has recently won two significant international competitions – ‘Formosa’, a futuristic 300m tower in Taiwan and the Beton Hala Waterfront Centre in Belgrade. He is perhaps best known for his 2013 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in Hyde Park, London (he was the youngest architect to awarded this prestigious annual commission).

Fujimoto is renowned for designing intriguing structures that combine a traditional Japanese application to craftsmanship with non-traditional notions of spatial arrangement. An early project, the Jenga-like Final Wooden House (2008), for instance, was an investigation of the “primitive conditions before architecture” – an outwardly calm and cube-like form belies an interior of seemingly random protrusions, where heavy timber and relative voids defy common labeling. Walls and floors are also chairs, tables or places for repose. It is an imagining of architecture before functions and roles were prescribed to spaces.

Themes of ambiguous space, the blurring of distinctions and the coexistence of architecture with nature resonate throughout Fujimoto’s other works. Where Final Wooden House is insular and dense, House NA (2011) is conceptually open and arboreal. A transparent, white, three-storey steel-framed structure is broken down into 21 staggered platforms of varying heights, with every horizontal level treated as a standard surface without a prescribed function. Arboreal themes also abound in L’Arbre Blanc (The White Tree), one of 12 ‘modern follies’ for the city of Montpelier; the large-scale project (completion: 2017) is a housing tower that sprouts balconies in all directions (earning it the sobriquet the ‘pine cone’).

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