Sou Fujimoto

Particularly lauded at the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona last October, the astonishing “Final Wooden House,” winner in the “Private House” category, afforded a wide international audience an opportunity to get to know better the man behind it:  Sou (Sosuke) Fujimoto. Born in Hokkaido (Japan) in 1971, this young architect, a graduate of the University of Tokyo, has specialised, so to speak, in the research of and experimentation with single-family or grouped dwellings.  Influenced by nature and the physical aspects of our world, but also an admirer of Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and Mies van der Rohe, he embarked early on competitions and conceptual explorations to create a totally different way of understanding architecture.

One of his first residential projects, the N House (2001) is a surprising dwelling with absolute permeability between the inside and the outside.  This simple cube, with 90 m˛ of floor space, is composed of an inhabitable volume set in a larger volume which serves as a garden, creating a series of geometric frames, like paintings of the city.  The architect delights in engaging in a subtle game with the built volumes and nature.
Prolific and ambitious, Sou Fujimoto has already completed several projects, which have attracted attention and won awards very often in Japan and elsewhere.  The simple forms that he prefers break down into several branches or are intersected in a carefully orchestrated spatial order.  For the 7/2 project in Hokkaido, the wooden box-like structure formed of two small houses is divided into seven different shapes articulated independently to generate diverse spatial landscapes. 
A weekend house situated on the rocky ground facing the Pacific Ocean, the O House is conceived like the branches of a tree.  Nevertheless, all the spaces are in continuous relation between them, without any real boundary.  The location affords marvellous, panoramic vistas in several directions.  Listed in the book entitled “”100 bâtiments majeurs du XXIe sičcle” [One Hundred Major Buildings of the 21st Century], published by the Editions du Moniteur (Paris), the T House is a simple monolith with painted concrete walls that show the trace of the rough casing planks on the outside.  This single-family house can be seen as a primitive dwelling, simple and complex at the same time.  It is above all what Sou Fujimoto describes as “the architecture of distance,” because for him, “creating architecture is nothing else than creating various distances.” In an open-plan design, its contours are “folded” at several points.  Each space generated between the walls is both separated from and connected with others.  “Space consists of relations,” the architect likes to point out in his book “Primitive Future” published by INAX Publishing.  At the outset, architecture undoubtedly consisted only of distance, well before roofs and walls arrived.  The distances indicated the degrees of interaction between people and objects.  (…)  These interactions are transformed to infinity with movement.”  For most of his projects, Sou Fujimoto relies on these relations and the plan of the building as a whole.

Although it seems perilous at first glance, the collective housing project built in the centre of Tokyo is the projection of the city in miniature, an overcrowded and confused urban space.  This project is composed of five housing units, each of which consists of two or three compartments, designed according to the prototypical shape of the house.  The external stairways establish a close relation between the city and the dwelling.  Each living unit thus consists of interconnected rooms and urban spaces.  You can even walk on the roofs…

In his quest for a new architecture, Sou Fujimoto thinks about concepts of primitive architecture.  This is how he came to design a small 4 m x 4 m cubic pavilion, set in a copse of Kumamoto.  The Final Wooden House is built by piling up massive Japanese cedar beams, interconnected by metal cables.  Some are off-centre inside to create shelves and to be used to go from one level to another.  The glazed openings in the walls and the roof provide the indispensable natural light.  The architect wanted no separation between the floor, the wall and the ceiling (the floor becomes a chair, for example).  Spatiality is perceived differently by each person, depending on his or her position in space.  This pavilion is related to the primitive living conditions, before architecture.  As in this project, all the works of Sou Fujimoto reveal his fascination with spatial relativity and a new sense of distances which is incompatible with the conventional rules of architecture.  Would his residential model be somewhere between a futuristic dwelling and a “cave,” a primitive space that people have to fit up in a creative manner?  To be continued. 

http://www.sou-fujimoto.com/