Combining playful observations with refined craft, Fujimori’s teetering structures draw on ancient Japanese traditions

Illustration by Nao Sakamoto
Now a respected professor and museum director, a popular historian, critic, artist and path-breaking architectural inventor, Terunobu Fujimori (1946-) took six years to meander through a four-year undergraduate programme in architectural design. His 1970 thesis represented his school in a national exhibition and was widely deemed one of the finest, along with a project by Shin Takamatsu. Inspired by Archigram, Fujimori employed a hammy industrial aesthetic that Takamatsu himself would use to draw international acclaim in the 1980s.
Fujimori, however, decided design was not for him, turning instead to architectural history at the University of Tokyo, which would remain his academic home until he retired in 2010. During his second year in the master’s programme, his mentor Teijiro Muramatsu dispatched him to survey early 20th-century structures built in South Korea. He found his first love: the architecture of Japan’s Meiji era, the period from 1868 to 1912.

Credit: Dana Buntrock
Until the mid-19th century, Japan’s borders had been largely closed to trade and visitors for centuries. When they reopened, an enthusiasm for European novelties rapidly transformed the nation and spread to its colonies. Buildings advertised modernity with exotic materials like brick and glass or previously unseen architectural devices like expansive stairways and domes. Ornament flourished, from gaudy friezes of putti and mythical beasts of prey to exaggerated Japanese and Chinese motifs.
When Fujimori began pursuing fin de siècle architecture, the profession was unenthusiastic; that era’s works were too naïve and florid. Records were few. He searched city streets across Japan, enlisting collaborators. The group dubbed themselves the Architectural Detective Agency; one, architectural photographer Akihisa Masuda, remains a key collaborator. Over six years, the group catalogued 1,300 major Meiji structures, most previously unknown. Fujimori completed his PhD in 1980 and released the survey. Two years later, he also published his dissertation on Meiji planning and the first of a series of popular guidebooks by the Architectural Detective Agency. The survey and dissertation pulled in professional respect and a major publishing award, the guides, best-sellers, bringing him public celebrity. Fujimori’s publications from the 1980s included a large, three-volume set embossed in leather and lavishly illustrated with Masuda’s photos, and colourful pocket guides bought for less than the price of a lunch. Ever since, Fujimori has swung between academic erudition and everyday appeal.

ROJO documented leftover and useless structures which had become pieces of art in themselves

In Rojō Kansatsugaku Nyūmon, 1986, ROJO drew the equipment they used
Those forays across the country also brought him into another group: ROJO (the Roadway Observation Society), a collective of artists including Genpei Akasegawa. They too surveyed city streets around the country. Not easily – they are all, Fujimori notes, incompetent at steering anything more sophisticated than a bicycle. They prankishly hunted for surreal and accidental art, unconventional beauty: chickens cooped in television sets, stairs leading to nowhere. ROJO blessed each one with inflated, punning titles.
In the 1980s, Fujimori discombobulated the architecture world with his first building, a shaggy little structure in his hometown: the Jinchokan Moriya Historical Museum, built for the Moriya family, hereditary leaders of a nationally important shrine that dates back to the Stone Age. Government money was available to house the family’s artefacts, so they asked Fujimori to identify a designer. He was flummoxed. The architects he knew yearned for international acclaim; Japan felt rich and 1980s styles, driven by a speculative financial bubble, were attention-getting. They all seemed a poor fit in his charming, anachronistic town. Fujimori decided to design it himself. The museum is clad in unusually long, hand-split shingles and smeared with mud. Its entry is flanked by four thin yew trunks stabbing through a slate roof, the centre pair stretching towards the sky; tiny iron birds like the ones used in the Suwa Shrine’s rituals perch on the knobby remnants of branches. Inside, there’s a drawbridge between the exhibition room and the storage space. The small tower to the rear tapers, rooted.

Fujimori designed the Jinchokan Moriya Historical Museum, 1991, after failing to find a suitable architect for the Moriya family

Fujimori’s teahouses are designed with a childlike sense of wonder. The Flying Mud Boat, 2012, apparently hovers mid-air and is only accessible by ladder
Credit: Skye Hohmann / Alamy
A lot of architects derided the historian as an amateur. Kengo Kuma called it ‘a punch right to the jaw of modernism’. Arata Isozaki mused: ‘He was a respected architectural historian who one day abruptly began producing such objects, as if he had suddenly gone crazy.’ Toyo Ito pointed out the proportions were strange, later calling him a ‘maniac with unusual taste’. ROJO had his back, encouraging him when others did not.
Fujimori was born in a far different era; rural Japan then was not so different from centuries earlier. Houses, like his own childhood home, were commonly built in ancient styles with thatched roofs. As is often the tradition in small, rural communities, many from his hometown of 70 households tore the old roof off. When he was small, the family replaced their roof with a metal one and, aged eight, he was put to work assisting the carpenter who oversaw the remodelling of his pre-Meiji house.
‘There’s a nostalgia for a child’s way of seeing the world’
Fujimori decided the Jinchokan Moriya Historical Museum should hark back as far as the Moriya family, skipping the many eras of architecture he’d previously studied. Some call this an architectural expression of 1960s anti-art movements and point to Akasegawa’s influence. Fujimori himself says we can claim two international eras in architecture: the opening act, when rudimentary structures everywhere were built with simple skills – he made a serious study of primitive structures found around the world, built with logs, mud and stone – and our current global one.
Next, he designed his own home, the 1995 Tanpopo (‘dandelion’) House and the 1997 Nira (‘leek’) House for Akasegawa, the first sprouting weeds in the walls and the second growing leeks on the roof. He and his collaborators searched the mountains near his home – collectively owned by the community – to cull lumber. The wood was finished at the local sawmill. In these early years, Fujimori met builders’ unwillingness to build roughly, allowing awkward craft to reveal the hands that caused it. Plasterers predicted his finishes would crack and refused the formulations he requested; no trades were prepared to plant weeds within the walls and roofs. In an echo of the way his village had once come together, ROJO stepped in, with another ostentatious title: the Jomon (‘neolithic’) Company. They built artlessly when others refused.

Fujimori shapes models for his teahouses out of whole logs, here for Takasugi-an, a teahouse in Chino, Nagano

Takasugi-an is supported by chestnut trees
Credit: Terunobu Fujimori

The chestnut trees that support Takasugi-an are revealed in the interior
Credit: Edmund Sumner-VIEW / Alamy
While designing Akasegawa’s home, Fujimori discovered another lasting love, an architecture with little utilitarian purpose. The artist wanted a tiny hideaway; it became a tearoom poking through the roof’s lawn of leeks. Fujimori’s unconventional approach to tea, refusing to accommodate its elaborately choreographed ritual, eschewing tatami mats and other architectural conventions, gained credibility with his next clients: a Kyoto temple priest and the former prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa, who requested a folksy structure to welcome his friend Jacques Chirac. Hosokawa’s family line can be traced back to samurai warrior Tadaoki Hosokawa, who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries, one of seven disciples under Japan’s greatest tea master, Sen no Rikyu. Fujimori’s challenges to conventional tea were now unassailable with the support of Hosokawa.
Fujimori says that handing over Hosokawa’s 2003 Ichiya Tei (One Night Teahouse) was so painful he realised it was time to build his own: the 2004 Takasugi-an (Too Tall Teahouse), in his hometown. It wobbled unsteadily on two chestnut trunks that looked like legs, accessed up a ladder and through a trap door. Since then, Takasugi-an has been joined by the 2010 Flying Mud Boat – the first of several seemingly, and sometimes actually, mobile teahouses, some of which floated on water and others on wheels. Teahouses remain his calling card, found around the world. Go-an, built this year in connection with the Tokyo Olympics, stood sentry near the stadium.

The dining room at the student dormitory for Kumamoto Agricultural College is punctuated by tree trunks
Credit: Akihisa Masuda

Go-an, 2021, designed for the Tokyo Olympics, invites visitors to crawl through a small opening in the grass-covered structure and climb a ladder to the main tea ceremony room
Kengo Kuma wrote an essay on Fujimori’s Jinchokan Moriya Historical Museum, titled ‘Nostalgia Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen’. Many now appreciate that these works reflect an archaic heritage, but there’s another nostalgia for a child’s way of seeing the world. The professor’s tearooms bristle with things we sketched when we were younger: bridges, hiding places, facades with friendly faces. Fujimori invites children to help him build his quirky, lopsided structures or decorate exteriors, sharing the experience he enjoyed as a small child when he and his neighbours would come together to repair buildings.
In those early years, Fujimori built a few larger structures, including the award-winning student dormitory for Kumamoto Agricultural College (2001), a forest of faceted red pine columns loosely sprinkled through its dining room. But he preferred something smaller, designing for a variety of quirky characters in out-of-the-way spots: Camellia Castle for a sake distiller, Yoro Insect Museum for an insect collector, Soda Pop Spa hot springs baths spangled with gold leaf and oyster shells. Fujimori charred cedar to make it last, influenced by western Japan’s yakisugi technique, and planted pine trees on steeply sloped roofs, looking like improbable ponytails.

Designed with the Yamamoto family’s two young children in mind, Roof House, 2009, is perforated by a number of teetering tree houses and began an extended collaboration with the Yamamoto family

Fujimori later designed Kusayane (Grass Roof), built for the Yamamoto family’s confectionery
business
Credit: Nacasa & Partners Inc
In 2009, he completed a whole village of little houses squatted on top of the main building for Roof House. The clients, Takao and Haruka Yamamoto, were part of a large family enterprise, Taneya, known for its tasty sweets. The Yamamoto family and their cake and sweet company – founded in the Meiji era – turned out to be an ideal match. They commissioned Fujimori to develop a playful public-facing complex not far from Roof House, yielding his finest work, including the Kusayane (Grass Roof), Douyane (Copper Roof) and Kurihappon (One Hundred Chestnut Trees). A host of agricultural staff keep the roofs green and plant rice in a central pond each spring. Children pop in and out of little structures that recall ancient, standing stones. The CEO sits on chairs Fujimori has pieced together with lumps of chestnut, his favourite hardwood. They appear to have come from a 1960s space-age comic book.
In 2017, Fujimori added another line to his CV, becoming the director of the Edo-Tokyo Museum. The vast building is a treasure trove of reconstructed shacks and city streets – everything Fujimori has ever designed could easily fit inside the 62-metre-tall structure by Kiyonori Kikutake. It looks, oddly, like a hulking, half-alive beast. Even with the added responsibility, Fujimori still builds and publishes, perhaps more prolifically than ever. This year, in addition to Go-an, he added a teahouse to a former missile base in Germany, standing upright on six squiggly Black Locust logs. And he’s finishing a small community centre not far from the Jinchokan Moriya Historical Museum, where everything began.

