Terunobu Fujimori, the Magician of Houses
A master of charred wood and houses of surreal trees, Fujimori is the best thing to have happened to architecture in our time.
Tiny houses balanced upon crooked legs, teahouses 30 feet off the ground and dandelions emerging from the roof of a house (his own); all of this is part of the fantastical universe of the great Japanese architect Terunobu Fujimori. His work is among the most extravagant and aesthetic of the heritage of humanity.
Fujimori constructs spaces so that, within them, conversations will take place about another kind of world: one that is related precisely to what his architecture proposes: environmentally sensitive messages, fairy tales, formal games and intimacy. After all, this is all about a man who designed his first space at the age of 44 (after a life of being a historian of architecture), and who lives in a house wrapped in dandelions. His repertoire of buildings lies between magic and the prosaic, between the distant past and the distant future.
The Japanese architect took the clean and small-scale Japanese tradition and Western science fiction to create spaces that appear to emerge from the earth or from a mountain. Like perfect paradoxes, there are charred wooden boats that float, traditional warehouses of the future and teahouses that levitate above a forest. It is as if his houses had always been there, as if the imagination of the world had thought them up and built them.
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