Inform agency architect was at the lecture of a famous architect Terunobu Fujimori in Turin-2008. Our personal correspondent Polina Chugunova was the one who took photographs of Terunobu's projects during the lecture.

How I created my first building

by Terunobu Fujimori

I was an architectural historian until the age of 45. My work involved looking, thinking, and writing about buildings others had created in the past. And then at 45, I suddenly found myself making architecture. I was asked to design a small repository for a shrine in the place where I was born, where I grew up. That shrine boasts a proud, ancient history, going back more than 2000 years. Spirits live in trees, rocks and rivers. I was raised at the foot of that mountain, deeply influenced by animism. The moment I began designing, I was immediately faced with a problem: contemporary architecture does not sit comfortably with the Shinto faith, with the natural landscape. Twentiethcentury architecture was based on science and technology, with barely a thought for nature. I changed my approach, trying to create a design inspired by the area’s traditional homes and shrines, but I found it somehow strange. As an architectural historian, I found it jarring. The traditional style of homes and shrines goes back to the age when Japan first farmed, but it is not appropriate for this faith that has been handed down from an era when the Japanese were simple huntergatherers, many centuries ago. I needed to design something fitting for this faith, whose origins go back even further. My approach explores the relationship between architecture and nature. Fundamentally, there are two problems. First, earth, stone, bamboo, grasses, tree bark, and charred wood are all architectural materials originating in nature. If you compare natural materials to manufactured ones, they are inconsistent in character and weaker. And so I use manufactured materials for building structure and natural materials as finishes. In this way, the building blends in visually with the surrounding natural environment, while manufactured technology compensates for natural materials’ weaknesses. This approach has successfully given birth to an expression that has no precedent, and is of no specific time or place. The other question is how to bring plants, as a fundamental form of nature, into my architecture. The problem with Le Corbusier’s proposals for roof gardens is that these did not succeed in combining the beauty of plant life with that of the architecture. I came up with a new way to integrate plants, a substitute for the roof garden: the walls and roof of a house planted with rows of dandelions, a roof covered with flowering chives, a roof topped with pines or camellias. I’d like to share this unusual marriage of vegetation and architecture with the world. Lately, there has been one other theme creeping into my architecture: minimal sufficiency. How small can architecture become and still preserve its qualities?

In a tiny space, I introduce fire to symbolise that this is a human dwelling. Starting with Takasugi-an, the “Too-high Teahouse” which is over six metres tall, I offer six works that deviate considerably from the norms of twentieth-century architecture.