House O is one of the architect's oldest projects and was designed as a weekend retreat in Chiba, before being destroyed during the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. House N was completed more recently and is a residence with three layers of walls and ceilings.

The architect's largest projects include the Children's Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation, a treatment center for mentally disturbed children, and the Musashino Art University Library with walls made of timber shelves.

Sou Fujimoto also recently completed House NA, a residence with hardly any walls, and was part of the team that won a Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for designing housing for those made homeless by the 2011 disaster. See more architecture by Sou Fujimoto.

All photography is by Edmund Sumner.

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photographed by Edmund Sumner appeared first on Dezeen.

The semi-transparent pavilion will occupy 350 square-metres of lawn outside the London gallery. Two entrances will lead inside the structure, where staggered terraces will provide seating for a central cafe.

Sou Fujimoto describes his design as "an architectural landscape" where "the vivid greenery of the surrounding plant life [is] woven together with a constructed geometry".

"The delicate quality of the structure, enhanced by its semi-transparency, will create a geometric, cloud-like form, as if it were mist rising from the undulations of the park," said Fujimoto. "From certain vantage points, the pavilion will appear to merge with the classical structure of the Serpentine Gallery, with visitors suspended in space."

The temporary pavilion will open to the public on 8 June and will remain in Kensington Gardens until 20 October.

Sou Fujimoto is the third Japanese architect to accept the annual unpaid commission, which is one of the most highly sought-after small projects in world architecture and goes to a major architect who hasn't yet built in the UK. Toyo Ito designed the pavilion in 2002, while SANAA followed in 2009. Past projects by Sou Fujimoto include a house that has hardly any walls, another with three layers of windows and a library with shelves on the exterior.

Last year's pavilion was a cork-lined archaeological dig created by Herzog & de Meuron with Ai Weiwei, who was forbidden to leave China at the time. Dezeen filmed interviews with Herzog & de Meuron at the opening, where Jacques Herzog told us how they sidestepped the regulations to be allowed to participate and Pierre de Meuron explained how cork was used to appeal to "all the senses, not just your eyes". Before that it was a walled garden by Peter Zumthor, who told us at the opening in 2011: "I’m a passionate architect... I do not work for money". Watch that movie here.

Other past commissions include Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry - see our handy guide to all the Serpentine Gallery Pavilions here.

See all our stories about the Serpentine Gallery Pavilions »
See more architecture by Sou Fujimoto »

Images are by Studio Cyrille Thomas.

Here's the full statement from Sou Fujimoto:

For the 2013 Pavilion I propose an architectural landscape: a transparent terrain that encourages people to interact with and explore the site in diverse ways. Within the pastoral context of Kensington Gardens, I envisage the vivid greenery of the surrounding plant life woven together with a constructed geometry. A new form of environment will be created, where the natural and the man-made merge; not solely architectural nor solely natural, but a unique meeting of the two.

The Pavilion will be a delicate, three-dimensional structure, each unit of which will be composed of fine steel bars. It will form a semi-transparent, irregular ring, simultaneously protecting visitors from the elements while allowing them to remain part of the landscape. The overall footprint will be 350 square-metres and the Pavilion will have two entrances. A series of stepped terraces will provide seating areas that will allow the Pavilion to be used as a flexible, multi-purpose social space.

The delicate quality of the structure, enhanced by its semi-transparency, will create a geometric, cloud-like form, as if it were mist rising from the undulations of the park. From certain vantage points, the Pavilion will appear to merge with the classical structure of the Serpentine Gallery, with visitors suspended in space.

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Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013 appeared first on Dezeen.

This Tokyo house by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto has hardly any walls and looks like scaffolding (photos by Iwan Baan).

House NA has three storeys that are subdivided into many staggered platforms.

The few walls that do exist are mostly glass, making certain spaces secure without adding privacy.

See more projects by Sou Fujimoto here, including a stack of four house-shaped apartments.

See more images of this project on the photographer's website.

Here's some more information from the architects:

House like a single Tree

House standing within a residential district in central Tokyo.

To dwell in a house, amongst the dense urbanity of small houses and structures can be associated to living within a tree. Tree has many branches, all being a setting for a place, and a source of activities of diverse scales.

The intriguing point of a tree is that these places are not hermetically isolated but are connected to one another in its unique relativity. To hear one's voice from across and above, hopping over to another branch, a discussion taking place across branches by members from separate branches. These are some of the moments of richness encountered through such spatially dense living.

By stratifying floor plates almost furniture-like in scale, throughout the space, this house proposes living quarters orchestrated by its spatio-temporal relativity with one another, akin to a tree. The house can be considered a large single-room, and, if each floor is understood as rooms, it can equally be said that the house is a mansion of multifarious rooms. A unity of separation and coherence.

Elements from furniture scales come together to collectively form scale of rooms, and further unto those of dwellings, of which renders the city.

The steps between the plates at times will become seating and desks, at times as a device segmenting a territory, and at times each akin to leaves of the foliage filtering light down into the space.

Providing intimacy for when two individuals chooses to be close to one another, or for a place afar still sharing each other's being. For when accommodating a group of guests, the distribution of people across the entire house will form a platform for a network type communication in space.

The white steel-frame structure itself shares no resemblance to a tree.

Yet the life lived and the moments experienced in this space is a contemporary adaptation of the richness once experienced by the ancient predecessors from the time when they inhabited trees. Such is an existence between city, architecture, furniture and the body, and is equally between nature and artificiality.

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Here are some images by photographer Iwan Baan of a house by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, where rectangular windows puncture three layers of walls and ceilings.

Located in Oita, Japan, House N was constructed in 2008 to accommodate a couple and their pet dog.

Openings in the outer wall and roof aren't glazed, so the patio garden, bathroom and kitchen contained behind are open to the elements.

A bedroom and tatami room are encased behind the second layer, where all window openings are infilled with glass.

The innermost layer closes in around the centre of the house, wrapping around a living and dining room.

See more projects by Sou Fujimoto here, including a stack of four house-shaped apartments.

Here's some more text from Sou Fujimoto Architects:

House N
Oita, Japan

A home for two plus a dog. The house itself is comprised of three shells of progressive size nested inside one another. The outermost shell covers the entire premises, creating a covered, semi-indoor garden. Second shell encloses a limited space inside the covered outdoor space. Third shell creates a smaller interior space. Residents build their life inside this gradation of domain.

I have always had doubts about streets and houses being separated by a single wall, and wondered that a gradation of rich domain accompanied by various senses of distance between streets and houses might be a possibility, such as: a place inside the house that is fairly near the street; a place that is a bit far from the street, and a place far off the street, in secure privacy.

That is why life in this house resembles to living among the clouds. A distinct boundary is nowhere to be found, except for a gradual change in the domain. One might say that an ideal architecture is an outdoor space that feels like the indoors and an indoor space that feels like the outdoors. In a nested structure, the inside is invariably the outside, and vice versa. My intention was to make an architecture that is not about space nor about form, but simply about expressing the riches of what are `between` houses and streets.

Three nested shells eventually mean infinite nesting because the whole world is made up of infinite nesting. And here are only three of them that are given barely visible shape. I imagined that the city and the house are no different from one another in the essence, but are just different approaches to a continuum of a single subject, or different expressions of the same thing- an undulation of a primordial space where humans dwell. This is a presentation of an ultimate house in which everything from the origins of the world to a specific house is conceived together under a single method.

Architects: Sou Fujimoto Architects
Sou Fujimoto, principal-in-charge;
Yumiko Nogiri, project team

Consultants: Jun Sato Structural Engineers, structural
Structural system: reinforced concrete

Major materials: reinforced concrete
Site area: 236.57㎡
Built area: 150.57㎡
Total floor area: 85.51㎡
Structural Composition: RC; 1 story
Design Period: 2006 – 2007
Construction Period: will be completed in 2008

Design team: Sou Fujimoto Architects
Consultant: Jun Sato Structural Engineer

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Photographer Edmund Sumner has sent us these photographs of a university library in Tokyo by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto that has an exterior of timber shelves covered by planes of glass.

The massing of the two-storey library at Musashino Art University is composed entirely from the shelves, which will hold the books.

Circulation routes spiral around both ground and first floor between apertures cut-out of the shelving.

The library also includes a closed archive, which is located in the basement.

More architectural photography by Edmund Sumner on Dezeen »

More projects by Sou Fujimoto Architects on Dezeen »
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The following information is from Sou Fujimoto:

Musashino Art University Museum and Library

This project is a new library for one of the distinguished art universities in Japan. It involves designing a new library building and refurbishing the existing building into an art gallery, which will ultimately create a new integration of the Library and the Art Gallery.

The project described hereinafter is the plan of the new library which sits within the first phase of the total development.

Acting as a huge ark, a total of 200,000 units, of which 100,000 will be out in an open-archive, while the other half within closed-archive, rests within this double-storey library of 6,500 ㎡ in floor area.

Library made from bookshelves

When I thought of the elements which compose an ultimate library, they became books, bookshelves, light and the place.

I imagined a place encircled by a single bookshelf in the form of a spiral. The domain encased within the infinite spiral itself is the library. Infinite forest of books is created from layering of 9m high walls punctuated by large apertures.

This spiral sequence of the bookshelf continues to eventually wrap the periphery of the site as the external wall, allowing the external appearance of the building to share the same elemental composition of the bookshelf-as-the-library.

One’s encounter with the colossally long bookshelf within the university landscape registers instantaneously as a library, yet astonishing in its dreamlike simplicity.
The library most library-like.
The simplest library.

Investigation and Exploration

Investigation and exploration are two apparent contradictions inherent in the design of libraries.

Investigation is, by definition, a systematic spatial arrangement for the purpose of finding specific books. Even in the age of Google, the experience of searching for books within the library is marked by the order and arrangement of the physical volume of books.

The opposing concept to Investigation is the notion of Exploration. The significance of library experience is also in discoveries the space engender to the users. One encounters the space as constantly renewed and transforming, discovers undefined relationships, and gains inspiration from unfamiliar fields.

To achieve the coexistence of the two concepts, spatial and configuration logics beyond mere systematics is employed.

Here, the two apparent contradictions inherent in libraries are allowed to coexist by the form of spiral possessing two antinomic movements of radial path and rotational movement. The rotational; polar configuration achieves investigation, and the numerous layers through the radial apertures engender the notion of Exploration through an infinite depth of books.

One can faintly recognise the entirety of library and at the same time imagine that there are unknown spaces which are rendered constantly imperceptible.

SOU FUJIMOTO
Musashino Art University Museum & Library

Tokyo, Japan
Design: 2007-09
Construction: 2009-10

Architects: Sou Fujimoto Architects-- principal-in-charge; Sou Fujimoto, Koji Aoki, Naganobu Matsumura, Shintaro Homma, Tomoko Kosami, Takahiro Hata, Yoshihiro Nakazono, Masaki Iwata, project team
Client: Musashino Art University
Program: University Library

Click above for larger image

Consultants: Eishi Katsura, adviser;
Jun Sato Structural Engineers--Jun Sato, Masayuki Takada, structural;
Kankyo Engineering--Takafumi Wada, Kazunari Ohishima, Hiroshi Takayama, MEP;
Taku Satoh Design Office--Taku Satoh, Shingo Noma, Kuniaki Demura, Inoue
Industries--Takafumi Inoue, Azusa Jin, Yosuke Goto, Hideki Yamazaki,

Click above for larger image

Furniture & Sign; Sirius Lighting Office--Hirohito Totsune, Koichi Tanaka, lighting;
CAMSA--Katsuyuki Haruki, facade;
STANDARD--Keisou Inami, skylight
General contractor: Taisei Corporation--Tsukasa Sakata
Structural system: steel frame, partly reinforced concrete
Major materials: wood shelf, glass, exterior; wood shelf, tile carpet, polycarbonate plate ceiling, interior

Click above for larger image

Site area: 111,691.93 m2
Built area: 2,883.18 m2
Total floor area: 6,419.17 m2

Click above for larger image

See also:

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Tokyo Apartment by Sou Fujimoto Architects	Pearl Academy of Fashion by Morphogenesis	Yakisugi House by Terunobu Fujimori

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by Sou Fujimoto Architects appeared first on Dezeen.