Sou Fujimoto: “Nature and architecture are connected, they can merge and intertwine"

2017 November 10

• The Japanese architect closed the opening week of the Biennial MUGAK by reviewing some of the projects that earned him an international reputation.
• The workshop “A Fine Line: Scenarios of  Bordering Conditions” will continue this weekend, with material sent from 13 architecture studios located in conflict zones all over the world.

Today, the architect Sou Fujimoto emphasised the dichotomy between interior and exterior, nature and architecture. In the closing lecture of the 1st. International Architecture Biennial MUGAK, held before several hundred people who filled up the halls prepared in the Miramar Palace for the occasion, Fujimoto highlighted that “nature and architecture are connected, they can merge and intertwine".

The architect explained to professionals and students how “freeing ourselves from the names of spaces, gives us more options to arrange things” and ultimately, to “redefine the functionality of space and the behaviour of people in it”. 

In addition to this way of enhancing creativity, he stressed that he likes to “respect the tradition of the place in which I carry out a project and contribute to it with something contemporary”. In respect to the project L’Arbre Blanc, Fujimoto pointed out that “it is possible to use common elements, balconies and blocks of flats for example, something conventional, and give it an unconventional use, so that the classical becomes completely different at the same time”. 

In his lecture, he reviewed some of his projects: smaller ones, like a toilet with glass walls and a view on a garden (“it is a public toilet but a very private one at the same time; it is a work on opposites and how we integrate them”), and larger ones, like Souk Mirage, a 1.2 km long space with a lake inside, which wasn't materialised in the end.

The challenge of improving quality of life for people with dementia

The second day of "Homes in an Ageing Society" finished in Miramar with six speakers who focused on initiatives in different countries as well as on present challenges.

Lone Sigbrand, an architect working at the Danish Building Research Institute (University of Copenhagen), highlighted that “the greatest social challenge in my country is the number of people with dementia, over 80,000 out of a total population of five million inhabitants, and only 25% have a bed in nursing home. We can't build such places for everyone but we can adapt their homes”. “Design and architecture should ensure that they feel safe, support their identity and allow them to do what they like", she explained. “A home expresses who you are as a person. When someone is transferred to a nursing home, they lose control of their physical environment and their individuality; it is important that they feel in control at a small scale, that they can put their imprint on the space and recognise their former life in those spaces”, Sigbrand affirmed. “First of all, it is important to reject those elements related to hospitals and assistive devices”.

“There are very good examples of architecture for the elderly and very good architects who materialised them; it would seem that good design is incompatible with this kind of housing, but it is not", Heitor García Lantarón explained. “We need housing for life”. “If we consider that cities have to be for everybody, why do we keep on designing housing for specific population groups?”, this architect asked, who arrived from Copenhagen.

The lawyer Andrés Labella gave some hints on the juridical possibilities for alternative formulas, more specifically for financing a home, such as ethical banking, crowdlending, crowdfunding or alternatives to the purchase and rent models.