At the age of 53, Sou Fujimoto is one of the rising figures of contemporary Japanese architecture. Both in France, where he has worked on several projects including a surprising teaching facility for the prestigious École Polytechnique, and in Japan where he is the masterplanner for Expo 2025 in Osaka, he is leaving his mark, seeking to give a new sense of meaning to the profession. Fujimoto discussed these two very recent projects and a number of his ideas about architecture with Philip Jodidio.
Sou Fujimoto was born in 1971 in Higashikagura on the island of Hokkaido, which is enough to set him apart in the world of contemporary Japanese architecture. Most well-known architects in Japan are from cities like Tokyo, Osaka or Kyoto, and in any case are more likely to have been born on the main island of Honshu. Higashikagura is a town of about 10,000 people located in central Hokkaido, Japan’s second largest island and its northernmost prefecture. It was long the land of the native Ainu people, who are thought to descend from hunter-gatherers of the Jōmon period (c. 14,000-300 B.C.). Although there is a long history of interaction and conflict between Japan and Hokkaido, Japanese annexation of the island along with a broad assimilation of the Ainu people, took hold only during the Meiji Restoration (1868). Today, Hokkaido is still substantially less populated and developed than the rest of the country. Links to ancient Japanese culture and traditions which are taken for granted in Honshu, have less presence in Hokkaido. There is still something of the wild north about the island, separated from Honshu by the Tsugaru Strait. Even the climate and the geography are different. In 2010, no less than 73% of the land area of Hokkaido was still covered with natural forests.
These forests in which Sou Fujimoto played as a child left a lasting impression on the architect he became, but his choice of profession was far from...
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