The Architect Making Conceptual Art Out of Buildings

From the depths of his six-year soggiorno in the land of 20-something lassitude, it might have been difficult to imagine his success. His breakthrough, or the initial set of signs that he might emerge from his self-created swamp of viscous inactivity, came with a pair of projects. The first was a competition in 2000 for an art museum in the Japanese coastal city of Aomori, which he entered with a proposal for a predominantly glass space that looked almost transparent — and lost. But he placed a remarkable second, and one of the judges of the competition, the renowned architect Toyo Ito (to whose liquid and sinuous work Fujimoto’s bears some comparison), published an article in Shinkenchiku (New Architecture) magazine praising his work as representative of a rising generation. “Of course, nothing was changed,” Fujimoto said. “I didn’t get any commissions by that. But in my feelings, I thought I could be on the surface of the water; before that, it was the bottom of the sea.” Fujimoto soon opened an office and registered as an architect. He overcame his shyness and began having more of a relationship with the media and with other architects.

His other project, in the late 1990s, was a series of hospital commissions for his father and a few of his friends, who were all psychiatrists. It was with this work that he began to fashion his distinctive, highly allegorical approach to design. Fujimoto’s childhood home was just 300 feet from the campus of his father’s psychiatric hospital; he remarked to me that his father and the other psychiatrists he associated with insisted on treating their patients not as ill people in need of confinement but as full individuals in need of space and freedom. The grounds were open, and patients often greeted the young Fujimoto in his family’s house. “In a sense, I was lucky to grow up in such an environment,” he said. Referring to the boundary between sickness and health, he added, “You could be on that side and could come back to this side.” The differences, as in other sorts of oppositions, were only a series of “gradations,” and this “has been a very basic understanding of the world for me.” It was not hard to find echoes of that philosophy in Fujimoto’s own story, in which he was a dropout for several years in a society that did not encourage that sort of behavior, a sense that one could come and go across the boundary of in and out as one pleased: that you could be on one side, and come back to the other.

Fujimoto’s Children’s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation in Date, Hokkaido, completed in 2006, was the last of the commissions and the first to achieve international renown. In images, the work appears as an eerie, gnomic scattering of 24 tall, white boxes, isolated on a hill. In plans, the buildings of the center look randomly assorted, at unpredictable angles to each other, nearly touching. Images of the interiors reveal a multitude of odd angles, creating corners that offer semiprivacy. Fujimoto’s logic, both in the placement of the buildings and in the creation of the interiors, was in fact based on a serious understanding of the particular needs of the children using the space. He spoke of how a psychiatric hospital should be like a refraction of society in miniature, since it had a residential aspect to it. Speaking of the children, of whom there are about 50 in residence, Fujimoto said, “Sometimes they like to hide a little bit, sometimes they like to be a little bit isolated. … We got the idea that children themselves could choose their distances between people, or choose their own hiding places sometimes by themselves, alone, or with two or three friends, really good friends, or much larger groups.” The spaces were meant to provide choices about how much distance the children kept between themselves and other people. Conceiving and executing the building was a constant renegotiation of closed and open spaces, and what sort of level of openness afforded privacy, and what level of closed-ness afforded contact. (Designers of open office plans: Take note.) Fujimoto’s long acquaintance with the doctor who commissioned the project “created a deeper understanding of his thinking,” he said, “and good trust with each other.”