Architecture Misfit #42: Terunobu Fujimori (藤森 照信)

Before everybody groans about another Pritzker Prize going to yet another Japanese architect, it might be worth wondering what factors might be responsible. Let’s begin by supposing the Pritzker Prize is shorthand for an architectural career of merit, or at least in the spotlight. The prize was inaugurated in 1979 and, as we know, its first recipient was Philip Johnson. Eight of the 47 awards to date have been to Japanese architects (1987: Kenzo Tange, 1993: Fumihiko Maki, 1995: Tadao Ando, 2010: Kazuo Seijima and Ryue Nishizawa, 2013: Toyo Ito, 2014: Shigeru Ban, 2019: Arata Isozaki and 2024: Riken Yamamoto). That’s 17% if we count Kazuo Seijima and Ryue Nishizawa as one, or 19% if we count them as two. The blanket reason for awarding the Pritzker Prize is “for services to Architecture” even though that’s something of a moveable feast. Still, Architecture owes Japan for approximately one fifth of its architectural services, even if we don’t know exactly what they are.

Over the years, there have been 41 misfit architects and Japanese architects are one in eight which is less than half the proportion of Pritzkers, albeit without the Pritzker’s condition that the recipients be living. Born in 1946, Terunobu Fujimori (藤森 照信) is still alive and Misift Architect #42. My reasons are most of the usual plus some. Terunobu Fujimori isn’t shunned by the architectural establishment (at least in Japan) but nor is he globally embraced and his every word amplified and repeated as if gospel. He’s a natural misfit and I’m slightly embarrassed to have overlooked him for so long for no better reason than I thought his architecture too whimsical. Let me lay out the reasons for my change of heart.

An unconventional CV

Fujimori’s friends describe him as having had a countryside childhood that was almost pre-war in its simplicity. From an early age, Fujimori was interested in materials and how buildings were made. He studied architecture, first at Tōhoku University and then in the graduate program at University of Tokyo. It would be easy enough to find out who taught him but he’s never made a point of mentioning it. He says he admired Archigram and his graduation project for some kind of inhabited bridge shows it.

When he submitted his graduation project, he thought it would be the last thing he’d ever design, and became an architectural historian of modern architecture in Japan instead. He wrote books. Appeared on television. He says he visited every piece of modern architecture in Japan, and played a game where he tried to guess the intentions of their architects. He was 45 in 1991 when he completed his first building, the 1991 Jinchōkan Moriya Historical Museum. For somebody who knows every living Japanese architect, his buildings were never going to be identifiable as having been influenced by any of them. The museum has been criticized for its earthen render covering the concrete protecting the artifacts inside. As if render had never covered concrete before.

Sound beliefs about what a building should be

Fujimori’s says his most important influence was the Jōmon Era (14,000–300BC) when people around the world solved their housing needs using whatever was at hand and however they could. We know the first half of this period as the Neolithic and Fujimori calls the houses of this period the First International Style. Fujimori attempts to create buildings defined by local landform and not by local tradition or style. Local materials are used. Local trees are felled and adzes used to fashion them into columns and beams.

A building should not resemble anyone else’s buildings, past or present, or any style that has developed since the Bronze Age.
– Terunobu Fujimori

Knowledge of local materials and techniques

Many projects in the 2020 TOTO monograph have stories about going into the local forest and, along with the local woodsman, selecting trees to be felled and used. It’s a very personal relationship with materials. Columns and beams of cedar are likely to be straight while those of chestnut are likely to be wobbly. Long planks of cedar are likely to warp so they are spaced and the gaps pre-filled with mortar to create stripes that are not necessarily decoration. Stuff like that. We’re not talking Ando’s concrete or Ludwig Mies’s tiresome I-beams.

Commissions obtained by word-of-mouth from like-minded people

Fujimori’s first few building projects were from people who had seen and admired how his earlier buildings either used materials or made use of their locations or, perhaps because of that, felt an affinity with them. Fujimori thinks that designing something as intimate as a house for people is a very personal thing and so only designs houses for friends or for people he has met and finds interesting. His thirty years of practice are unusual in having very little retail or commercial work. He says clients tend to choose him because they trust him with sites and landscapes that mean a lot to them. When Fujimori asked one client what kind of house they’d like, they replied “You decide.”

The buildings are generally not large

There was the one masterplan for Tokyo exhibited at the 2006 Venice Bienalle but I don’t think anyone took it as seriously as Tange wished his 1960 Tokyo Masterplan had been. Both were statements of position with respect to the future of Tokyo. Neither came to pass.

fujimoriEverything became content and content became the history of content. Since then, Fujimori has always dealt with buildings in the here and now, leaving visions of the future to architects more eager to show their visionary credentials. I admire him for that. In passing, at least since the rush for Mars of a few years back, I’m not aware of any architect currently offering us a rosy vision to believe in for the future, however unrealistic it may be. Fujimori’s focus on small themes linked to materials and context is the antithesis of today’s global (and extraterrestrial!) architecture visions. This was probably an unwise career move but, on the basis of how Fujimori appears through what and how he writes, he doesn’t seem angry, angsty, or preoccupied with his current relevance or future legacy. He’s not promoting himself by giving us prompts for how to comprehend him. He’s simply telling us his reasons for making the decisions he did and leaving it up to us. He doesn’t seem driven by the prospect of global fame although people, and not just me, once thought this about Peter Zumthor.

Fujimori is perhaps best known for his teahouses, although his interest in them is spatial rather than cultural – if one can find the difference. They often pop up at exhibitions.

Outside all the usual categories

Working outside the normal sphere of architecture as we know it

This hasn’t been so true since 2006 when he represented Japan at the Venice Bienalle, although prior to that he was well known in Japan as a commentator and author. A couple of the more recent projects are his largest yet but they are still mostly privately funded cultural buildings of some sort. Fujimori has never designed an office building, apartment tower, cultural centre, hotel, mixed-use development, train station, airport or any of the other modern symbols of architectural fame, if not architecture. He is creating cultural capital rather than economic. Fujimori’s buildings aren’t complicated but are difficult for many to understand. Japanese people are likely to find them delightful while those with a grounding in Western traditions are likely to find them discomforting because the Japanese architecture they prefer is the one in which they can see themselves reflected. When Fujimori says “A building should not resemble anyone else’s buildings, past or present, or any style that has developed since the Bronze Age” he means not just Western architecture but Japanese and all other architectures as well. If we see “Japaneseness” then it’s probably just because of the wood, sometimes the construction, and a willful disregard for what we see as “the rules by which the game of architecture is played”.

Does not use the working methods we’re led to believe are necessary for this day and age

Fujimori says he sketches because he has no assistants to make study models. His work method seems to be to sketch plans, elevations and sections for the client to approve, organize a building team and then go into the forest and select some trees. Other materials, details and everything else seem to be decided out on site. This way of working is almost the opposite of what architecture these days is supposed to require. Clients don’t ask for fancy renders of ten or twenty AI-generated options prompted by interns. They chose Fujimori because they trust his judgment. This is either some huge and important innovation or simply how the client-architect relationship once was. Can you imagine buildings being approved and built on the basis of sketches such as these? I’m not sure I can. I’d like to know more about Fujimori’s support team, such as whether they are the same people as in a kind of de-facto office, or whether they are created separately for each project and disbanded after. Either way, these sketches show fully formed buildings and aren’t the usual starchitect scribbles, so respect for that.

Willing to admit mistakes

Fujimori’s first major idea was to put plants on buildings and he had many early failures. He admits that all that plants want to do is grow. Over the years he has improved his methods and now has a better idea of what works and what doesn’t. Pine trees are hardy and grow very well on roofs.

Participatory construction

Many projects have local people, clients, friends and children helping with the project. The 2006 Nemunoki Children’s Museum of Art is decorated with children’s paintings of wheat.

Approachable architecture

Fujimori likes how children like his buildings. I suspect it’s because children are free of aesthetic baggage and education – unlike me, when I thought his buildings “too whimsical”.

Approachable architecture

The architecture of Terunobu Fujimori has nothing to do with algorithmic design. parametric design, AI building information-led design or anything to do with anything except how things used to be done once. This is perhaps his greatest strength, and what we find most disturbing.

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I never ex[ected I’d be trying to make a case for the architect of handcrafted art houses for clients who are obviously very wealthy. (One house has a huge piece of calligraphy by Yu-ichi Inoue. I couldn’t find any auction records for Shū (tree), that particular piece, but Tori (bird), a work of similar size and vintage changed hands on 27 May 2017 for US$104,776.)

I’m not saying the architecture of Terunobu Fujimori is some sort of template for the future. It’s not taking the world by storm. Nobody is rushing to imitate him. He is not “taught”. But, if somebody came along and, instead of hand-beaten copper sheeting, used something like flattened aluminum Coca-Cola cans, 44-gallon drums or discarded rubber tires with the same sensitivity, then we might have a way of doing architecture the world could use. Fujimori is no architectural threat to the profession. He seems content doing what he does but he makes us uncomfortable by reminding us there once were other ways of obtaining commissions, other ways of drawing, other ways of building, and other pleasures to be found in the making and experience of architecture. Perhaps if we stopped rating the worth of architecture by how much it legitimizes the going economic paradigm, we might just see some more of it.

藤森 照信
Terunobu Fujimori
1946

For all the above reasons,

misfits salutes you!

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Nov. 11: It’s a late postscript, but I realized I never returned to my opening question of why a disproportionate number of Pritzker Prize winners are Japanese architects. My simple answer is that I don’t believe they were ever that hamstrung by the Western classical tradition to begin with.

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