Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Through November 9, 2025
Tokyo Gendai week will also be the final chance to see the extensive survey the Mori Art Museum is dedicating to Sou Fujimoto’s architectural practice. This exhibition is the first comprehensive overview of the Japanese architect’s unique approach and philosophy, articulated across eight sections that trace his output over the past thirty years while spotlighting projects currently underway. As one of Japan’s most inventive voices of the 21st century, Fujimoto has consistently challenged conventional boundaries between interior and exterior, structure and environment, producing iconic buildings defined by an organic integration of nature, abstraction and human scale. His philosophy of “primitive future” looks both backward and forward—drawing from elemental shelters in nature while reimagining how architecture might adapt to dense urban societies and fragile ecologies. Fujimoto’s architecture is less about form as object than about creating porous environments that propose new modes of coexistence between people and with nature. He first gained international attention with House NA (2011) in Tokyo, a transparent, stacked glass-and-steel dwelling described as a “living tree” for urban life, where residents move between platforms like birds on branches. His memorable Serpentine Pavilion in London (2013)—a cloudlike lattice of thin white steel he called an “architectural landscape”—cemented his reputation for transforming ephemeral concepts of light, air and forest into inhabitable structures. What he created was a new kind of environment, where the natural and the man-made merge: not solely architectural, nor solely natural, but something entirely new. For Fujimoto, the fundamental question is how architecture differs from nature, and more importantly, how it might become part of nature, dissolving the line between the two. That inquiry extends into his recent works, such as the L’Arbre Blanc tower in Montpellier (2019), with balconies sprouting outward like leaves, and the House of Music Hungary in Budapest (2022), a flowing, perforated canopy that merges seamlessly with its park setting. Both push further his exploration of architecture as an organic and communal force. Looking ahead, Fujimoto has also been appointed Site Design Producer for Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan.
AloJapan.com