Futures of the future

Sou Fujimoto is one of the most acclaimed names in recent years among Japanese young generation of architects. Still young but plenty of experience, he is gradually passing the threshold of those considered among the youngest generation. Many of his first ideas and manifestoes since 1995 have materialized into projects attracting international attention and positioning his work next to other big names in the contemporary architectural zeitgeist.

His successful career is also paradigm of the current mainstream in media within the architecture discipline: intensively published and featured in multiple exhibitions in his home country and abroad. It is not surprise to see that since 2010 every consecutive year his work has been presented mainly in solo-shows hosted by the most prestigious architecture galleries in Tokyo.

Celebrating this year two decades of practice, TOTO Gallery MA, a small venue in Tokyo specializing in architecture and design, is hosting his latest exhibition: “Sou Fujimoto: futures of the future”. While the name of the show might sound redundant, ’future‘ has been a recurrent concept in the intellectual work of the architect from the start of his career.

Future has been a historical obsession not only for architects but artists, just to mention many of the ideas behind the Dada movement some 100 years ago. Among them, Marcel Duchamp ready-mades mastered the practice of object de-contextualization elevating the profane to the level of the work of art. “Is this art?” was one of the many questions Duchamp opened. Not new but necessary, Fujimoto has attempted to rise a similar question today in the architectural discipline through this exhibition.

Physical model-making is still one of the strongest design tools for many Japanese architects, a practice which some find culturally rooted in traditional craftsmanship and in the sensibilization with concepts of scale and matter. Preaching the same methodology, Fujimoto has presented since previous shows a praise for physical model-making. With his team he envisioned for this exhibition a collection of 111 small models standing on black pedestals densely distributed along the exhibition; a totalizing model-scape we could say. The architect refers to these models rather as “small seeds” or “small architectural proposals that stimulate a series of manifestations of possibilities”.

Having hosted many prominent Japanese and international architect solo-exhibitions, the spatial configuration of TOTO Gallery MA divides the experience for the visitor in two small galleries allocated in the 3rd and 4th floor of the same building, connected through an open patio with an exterior stair. The exhibition is organized through 12 main messages hidden between the models, a spatial arrangement that visitors are not necessarily expected to follow strictly but to discover casually. These messages are dominant themes in the work of Fujimoto such as place, gradient, city, density, forest, terrain, flow and nature among others.

The first gallery was conceived as a dark room allowing exterior light only from the existing long window connecting to the patio. The numerous amounts of models in this space are displayed to allow the minimum circulation for one person, forcing the visitor to look carefully at details and to establish an intimate dialogue with the models.

The shown mock-ups are mainly conceptual and related to past and current projects. Each of them displays a small tag with brief legend highlighting personal ideas and reflections of the architect for each of his spatial experiments.

The open patio of the Gallery is often a space subjected to unique appropriations on each exhibition. Fujimoto conceived this area similar to the previous dark room filling the space with models and creating visual continuity. One of the walls of the patio was covered with a reflecting surface, mirroring and distorting the images of displayed items and visitors. Some of the models presented include his recent winning proposal for a House of Music in Budapest (“Forest of Music”) and his Skyscaper/Forest recently built in the neighbor of Aoyama, in Tokyo.

Among the several study models other material displayed in the exhibition varies from a smashed pet bottle to an ashtray, or from a crumpled sheet of paper to a stainless steel strainer, passing through a cleaning sponge and a computer chip, all of them displaying tiny human scales next to them and presented mainly at the second gallery in the 4th. floor. Fujimoto avoids compromising his words with these objects as architectural manifestoes and approaches to them more as latent formal possibilities. “Is this architecture?“ he poses in some of his dialectical sentences; a question of myriad answers where he attempts to open new directions, at least for himself and for the future of his own practice.

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