We talk to Sou Fujimoto, who at 41 is the Serpentine Gallery's youngest choice of architect to design its summer pavilion
The fantasy of life without boundaries was popular in modern architecture: in the 1960s, for example, Yona Friedman of France, and Italian group Superstudio dreamed up great grids that would spread around the world, that could be occupied at will, with supplies of power and water that could be plugged into as desired. The dream was of buildings like open landscapes, occupied by modern nomads. There were many reasons why these projects were not built, one being their calculated indifference to the bourgeois idea of property ownership.
An architect who has come closer than most to realising these dreams is the 41-year-old Japanese Sou Fujimoto, unborn when the 1960s ended. He achieves them, that is, with houses on the small plots of Japanese cities, rather than the wide open spaces imagined by Superstudio. Soon his Serpentine pavilion, which looks like a temporary, miniature version of Friedman's grand grids, will open in London's Kensington Gardens.
Fujimoto's House NA is an inhabitable climbing frame in Tokyo, not suitable for anyone shy or retiring, made of impossibly spindly steel and enclosed by barely there glass. It makes the theatre of domestic life into a public spectacle, modified only by the fact that curtains may be drawn when privacy is wanted, and it turns inside out the mute residential boxes that are its neighbours. Fujimoto, who speaks calmly, a little abstractly, but with assurance, says: "It is like living in a tree: you can choose branches here and there where you can do different things. People can gather together or they can stay on different branches and chat."
His House N, built for a "couple in their 60s and their dog" in the town of Oita, is "a box within a box with a box". Each of its layers is perforated with rectangular openings, such that inside and outside overlap, and the actual line between house and garden becomes indistinct. "Usually in Japan," Fujimoto tells me, "a house is more closed to the outside and a garden is small and too exposed to the city and then there is a small street, so we tried to create nice gradations between the different areas, and create a covering for the garden and the house at the same time."
If House NA is a tree, House N is a "cloud", a high-ceilinged series of voids hovering about the ground-based living area. At other times he compares his architecture to fields, caves, nests and forests, and he has proposed a hurricane-like swirl of lines, which would house a complex of shops, restaurants and transport, in Belgrade. Nature, he explains, is important: "It is a really fundamental question how architecture is different from nature, or how architecture could be part of nature, or how they could be merged, or what are the boundaries between nature and artificial things."
This does not mean there is anything obviously organic in the appearance of his buildings. They tend to be curveless, and made of hard un-ageing materials, works of a high degree of contrivance and artificiality. Rather his interest in nature expresses itself in the way his structures capture external space, and in their emulation of the effects of natural phenomena. In particular he talks about the idea of "background", the way in which landscapes make distinct settings for life without prescribing what happens within them. A forest is "strong but at the same time really comfortable. People can ignore it, or just experience the different atmospheres … it allows people to behave as they like."
Along with nature, he likes to talk about "the behaviour of people" – "it is really fundamental to architecture, positively primitive. It has not changed a lot from 2,000 years ago, and I like to go back to the beginning, to the relationship between people and space." So his rectangular caves and nests, while looking very much of the present, are intended to allow people to carry on as they always have.
His Serpentine pavilion is another "cloud", a lattice made of skinny steel poles that will appear to hover over the ground. The aim is "not to create a building but to create a place", an "architectural garden", with "no strong walls and no strong colours". Despite the fact that it is all right angles and metal, Fujimoto says it will "have a small scale that fits to human bodies, soft and ambiguous, with a nice coexistence of order and disorder".
Personally, I like this line of thought – the idea that architecture is about making spaces that interact with what is around them, rather than precious objects; that it is a background to life, and incomplete without the activities and experiences that take place around it. Which does not mean that architecture has to be neutral or insipid – like the forests and caves Fujimoto keeps talking about, it can be powerful, but not the whole story. His works are not necessarily straightforward to inhabit, and it is striking that austere means such as steel and grids are used to pursue sensual ends, but that seems to be part of his game.
Fujimoto is the youngest architect of the 13 practices to have designed a Serpentine Pavilion. He is also the third Japanese, the other two – Toyo Ito and Sanaa – having created what are generally thought to be the best of the series. This may not be coincidental, as Japanese architects are usually comfortable with the idea of the temporary and the lightweight. Their country is also becoming a haven for intricate and subtle ways of designing buildings that are endangered elsewhere, a sort of nature reserve for old-fashioned architecture.
Where China provides a spectacle of brazen scale and speed of construction, at least some Japanese designers give a value to thoughtfulness and reflection. Fujimoto, for example, has a rare interest in drawing by hand, which he says "clarifies his thinking". It helps him achieve complexity and to work intelligently at different scales, things basic to the practice of architecture but often hard to find.
As for those 1960s ideas, Fujimoto has achieved them with the help of a major exclusion. He is not trying to transform society or challenge the ownership of property. He works within the precise lines of a building plot, or in the un-revolutionary location of Kensington. His buildings do in fact have boundaries – it is just that they are made indistinct. He builds dreams of living in trees or clouds, but not an actual unfettered, unlimited existence. Which, arguably, is as much as an architect can do.