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Sou Fujimoto debuts a white stainless steel pavilion for the 2016 Setouchi International Art Festival in Japan

Sou Fujimoto debuts a white stainless steel pavilion for the 2016 Setouchi International Art Festival in Japan

Sou Fujimoto‘s white stainless steel mesh structure fronting the shoreline in Kagawa, Japan, draws the eye for its seemingly random geometry and net-like texture.

The pavilion was conceptualized for the 2016 Setouchi International Art Festival, a hotly anticipated tri-annual affair. The nearly 30-foot-tall polyhedron allows visitors to enter its angular frame and view the shoreline as if from the inside of a very clean, angular fishing net.

French architect and filmmaker Vincent Hecht documented the opening for the so-called Naoshima Pavilion. Although a recent entrant to the international market, the Tokyo-based Fujimoto is famed for “jungle gym”-like houses supported by lattices of steel and glass that dispose almost altogether of interior walls.

In Tokyo, one such residence consisted of staggered platforms that moonlighted as floors, ceilings and furniture in keeping with spartan, furniture-eschewing Japanese style.

In 2013, Fujimoto was the youngest architect to be commissioned to create the annual pavilion at London’s Serpentine Gallery, which has previously enlisted Pritzker Prize–winners Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry.

Fujimoto fashioned a structure of slim steel poles painted white and arranged in an intricate lattice to blend with the surrounding greenery. On April 16, the architect released another book, titled Sou Fujimoto, Architecture Works 1995–2015, which documents over 376 pages encompassing his entire oeuvre from early competition proposals post-graduation to his latest international projects.

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