In a forest clearing in West Sussex, a tall wooden chimney stands propped up on timber scaffolding, a fierce jet of fire roaring from its top. All of a sudden, the flaming flue crashes to the ground with a loud thud, splitting open in a cloud of smoke to reveal a scaly blackened surface of charred planks within. “No trained architect would use this material,” says the 70-year-old Terunobu Fujimori, as he scuttles away to douse some more newspaper in a bucket of petrol. “Which is exactly why I like to use it,” he adds with a broad grin.

The mischievous architectural historian turned builder has made a name for himself in Japan by crafting beguiling little buildings that refuse to follow any of the usual rules. His hand-made structures look like the nests or cocoons of curious creatures, woven, whittled and thatched with organic, earthy materials that could have been scavenged from the forest floor. He has built a tiny teahouse for himself in Nagano, vertiginously perched at the top of two tree trunks (“because one leg is dangerous and three legs are too stable and boring”), and another – named the Flying Mud Boat – that hangs from wires like some floating seed pod. His buildings are sculpted with the fairytale allure of a child’s drawing, topped with oversized roofs and wonky chimneys, dotted with little hatches and porthole windows, as if transported from a manga animation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fujimori’s Flying Mud Boat Teahouse. Photograph: Skye Hohmann/Alamy

This woodland charring factory is part of Fujimori’s preparations for an exhibition at the Barbican on the Japanese house since 1945. He is building a teahouse in the gallery, using his trademark burnt wooden cladding. Entering the space through a low doorway, visitors will follow a winding path through grassy mounds to reach his black cabin, characteristically raised up on legs and accessed through a small opening at the top of a ladder. “The teahouse should always be slightly awkward to enter,” he explains. “The architecture should make you crouch, or crawl, so you show some respect for the tea ceremony.”

The house itself is seen as a temporary asset, lasting 30 years on average before a new one takes its place

The Barbican’s gnarled concrete walls will provide a pleasing contrast with the crackled black crocodile skin of Fujimori’s charred boards. The ancient Japanese practice of yakisugi was used for hundreds of years to seal wood against rot and rain, before weatherproof paint was invented. And it is just the kind of primitive technique that captures Fujimori’s imagination, coming from outside the traditional architectural canon.

“The history of architecture is much older than the history of architects,” he says, explaining how his training as a historian led him to try to shed any influence of what had gone before. “I made a rule that my work shouldn’t reference anything else in the history of architecture.”



Delighting in his role as a professional amateur, Fujimori builds his structures with the help of an enthusiastic band of friends known as the Jomon Company, taking their name from the Neolithic period of Japanese history. A motley group of volunteers that includes a novelist, painter, sake brewer, publisher and priest, they use basic tools to give buildings a warm, roughly hewn feel, their sideways approach leading to such eccentric details as leeks planted on rooftops and knobbly lumps of charcoal pressed into plaster ceilings.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ryue Nishizawa’s Moriyama House in Tokyo Photograph: Edmund Sumner/VIEW Pictures/Alamy

Fujimori, who got his first commission at the age of 44, is just one of more than 40 architects whose works will feature in this ambitious exhibition. Featuring more than 200 works, it reveals the Japanese house to be a site of unparalleled architectural invention over the past seven decades. It will show the products of postwar optimism and the promise of mass production in a country rebuilding itself from the ground up; the reaction against this brave new world and the longing for craft and tradition; the eco-experiments of the 1970s, followed by the lavish dreams of the 80s bubble economy; and, more recently, the ethereal urge to float away in whiter-than-white houses.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Takamitsu Azuma’s Tower House. Photograph: Andy Stagg/VIEW Pictures/Alamy

The private house in Japan has been a fertile laboratory for new ideas because there has always been such high demand for new dwellings. Never mind the fact that much of the urban fabric was obliterated by bombing in the second world war, or that the country suffers from frequent earthquakes – the house itself is seen as a temporary asset, lasting 30 years on average before a new one takes its place. It keeps the country in a perpetual building boom, and a continual churn of innovation.

“It might seem a strange idea in the west, but in Japan the house is a disposable thing,” says Barbican curator Florence Ostende. “Because of inheritance tax, people are much more likely to demolish their parents’ home and rebuild their own, and there isn’t the same attitude to preservation and heritage. Many of the houses in the exhibition are no longer standing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A model of Kiko Mozuna’s Anti-Dwelling Box. Photograph: Keizo Kioku/collection of Norihito Nakatani

With virtually no market for “pre-owned” homes – one of the reasons that Japan has the most architects per capita in the world – the house is a vehicle for personal expression. The exhibition is full of crepuscular concrete bunkers and diaphanous light-filled lanterns, homes that turn their back on the city and others that try to bring the city into the house, opening up the theatre of domestic life for all to see.

In the 1970s, cosmological enthusiast Kiko Mozuna conceived his home as a “nested universe”, composing a series of different sized cubes with triangular openings to form what he called the “Anti-Dwelling Box”. When creating a dwelling for a graphic designer, meanwhile, po-mo prankster Kazumasa Yamashita played on the idea of a facade by arranging its windows and light shaft into a Face House.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kazumasa Yamashita’s Face House in Kyoto

Other inventions are the product of necessity. When Takamitsu Azuma moved to Tokyo with his family in the 1960s, he could only afford a miniature 20 sq m triangular plot, so decided to stack all of the rooms in his house on top of each other in a startling concrete tower, the interior arranged in one continuous space around a spiral staircase. In a similarly epic performance of one man’s battle against the city, former Butoh dancer Keisuke Oka has been constructing his dream home in Tokyo for the last decade, driven by a desire to “build improvisationally, like dancing”. He casts concrete slabs in his basement using a variety of everyday objects to decorate the moulds, each piece of his madcap jigsaw 70cm wide – a measure set by the quantity of wet concrete he can carry by himself.

But visitors will not need to fly to Tokyo to experience the most startling domestic vision of all, thanks to a 1:1 recreation of Ryue Nishizawa’s seminal 2005 Moriyama House. Nishizawa “decomposed” the house into its constituent parts, building 10 standalone rooms separated by alleys and patios – transforming the site into its own little neighbourhood, with structures ranging from three storeys to a tiny pavilion containing only a shower.

A new film by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine will provide an eye-opening snapshot of the daily routine of 79-year-old Moriyama, a 21st-century urban hermit, as he potters around his habitat. As Nishizawa puts it: “Life can’t be contained within a single lot. People’s sense of living expands beyond it, effectively erasing all borders.” Nor does it appear, in the Japanese architectural imagination, that there are any limits to what a dwelling can be.