Pre-Expo: Architecture of Sou Fujimoto

Architecture of Sou Fujimoto
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan

We were lucky enough to visit Sou Fujimoto's first major exhibition while in town. This was a great 'pre-game' to Expo since we get to see his body of work throughout the years, and gain a deeper understanding to his design philosophy. 

The exhibition was extremely impressive, they did a compress and release technique right at the beginning, after reading his bio, you would take a left turn and be exposed to hundreds of physical models on display.
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The amount of inspirations was immeasurable, these physical models display all kinds of architectural theories in various scales, materialities, proportions, circulations, and forms. One could quickly observe Sou Fujimoto's diverse architectural languages and versatility, he not only expresses architecture in lightness by layering, but is also able to show heaviness through carving and stacking. Instead of focusing on the programs, I think his architecture is more about the 'in-between' spaces and circulations leading to the programs. His design also ties in nature closely, as if he's also designing a space for nature at the same time.

We then get to see the iterations on the Expo masterplan. The architect tested out lots of different configurations/layouts, some focused on the grid systems, some were emphasizing the circulations. We can also see he switched up the scales here and there just to make sure to consider the whole site, as well as mixing in section drawings so he's not just designing planarly.

The exhibition also included a scaled model of the Expo Grand Ring, again, this was before we visited the Expo so it really hyped it up for us.

Image from https://www.world-architects.com/en

As if all the physical models were not enough, the second part of the exhibition featured a timeline from 1994 when Sou Fujimoto first graduated from school until 2030 when his latest work will be complete. This reminded me of the timeline I did when I was back in school, I recorded all the different architectural learnings and trips I took to visit buildings. What's more interesting is that there were three rows for the timeline, first was his own architectural jouney, second one was the key architectural events happening in Japan, and the third was for the world architectural milestones. When you compare all three rows together, you get to see the full picture and context of his work. This timeline pointed out that we shouldn't be doing architecture in a silo, we as designers should be more self-aware and globally conscious.

Sou Fujimoto systematically tracking his architectural explorations throughout the year.

Last part of the exhibition was a research project collaborating with an university. It feels like a new wave of Japanese Metabolism architecture mixing with biomimicry and parametricism. They imagine a city where humans have jetpack so they can freely float around the space and really removed that y-axis constraint. It really changed the "ground rule" of architecture.

The project reminds me of the Megalon city from the movie Megalopolis by Francis Ford Coppola, the architectural consultant of the movie was Neri Oxman who also specializes in that field.

​It's refreshing and impressive to see such seasoned architect still engaging in speculative academic thinking and pushing the boundary of design medium while still practicing the foundamentals.