Terunobu Fujimori

Terunobu Fujimori was born in 1946 in Miyagawa, a district of Chino (Nagano Prefecture). After graduating in architecture from Tohoku University in 1971, he completed his doctoral coursework at the University of Tokyo and first made his name as a historian of modern Japanese architecture: his book on Meiji-era city planning for Tokyo won a prize in 1983, and his "Adventures of an Architectural Detective, Tokyo" received the Suntory Prize in 1986. With the artist Genpei Akasegawa (赤瀬川原平) and others he founded the Street Observation Society. He is professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo and has directed the Edo-Tokyo Museum.

In 1991 he designed his first building, for his home town: the Jinchōkan Moriya Historical Museum, built of reinforced concrete partly in timber, with an exterior of split boards and an interior of straw mortar that evokes earth. The museum marks the starting point of his later work. His manner rests on natural materials and plants: charred cedar, copper bent by hand, plaster, trees planted on roofs, as at the Lamune Onsen (2005) or Kodomari Fuji (2023). The student dormitory of the Kumamoto agricultural college (1999-2000), which he designed with three other architects, uses prefectural timber, lime from Ariake Sea shells and volcanic soil from Mount Aso. At the Mosaic Tile Museum in Tajimi, a four-storey reinforced-concrete public building, earth walls are set with broken tiles. He had long since devised a technique that lets non-professionals pour a four-metre bridge in concrete, first applied on the building site of an office block completed in 2023, and his finishing work readily involves the public.

His tea rooms have become his signature: Takasugi-an, perched six metres up in trees (2004), a mud boat hung from cables (2010), a half-buried tea room. He has built in London, Munich, Raiding (Austria) and Hombroich (Germany). He received the Japan Grand Prize for Art in 1997 for the Nira House, the Architectural Institute of Japan Prize in 2001, then the Japan Art Academy Prize for 2019, awarded in 2020, for the main shop of La Collina Ōmihachiman, and he was commissioner of the Japanese pavilion at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. He was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 2026.