Sou Fujimoto retrospective lands in tokyo’s mori art museum
Until November 9th, 2025, Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum presents The Architecture of Sou Fujimoto: Primordial Future Forest, the first major retrospective dedicated to the influential Japanese architect behind the Expo 2025 Grand Ring. Spanning three decades of work and eight thematic sections, the exhibition offers a journey through Fujimoto’s vision of architecture as a porous interface between people, nature, and the future city. Featuring models, installations, animations, and even plush toys engaged in dialogue, the show reimagines the architecture exhibition as an immersive forest.
all images by Tayama Tatsuyuki, courtesy of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
The Grand Ring model centers Primordial Future Forest show
Fujimoto’s signature design language, light, layered, and open, finds deep roots in the landscapes of his childhood in Hokkaido. But in the place of nostalgia, the exhibition at the Mori Art Museum proposes the forest as a metaphor for a new kind of urbanism that is decentralized and emotionally resonant. The idea emerges most explicitly in the central installation Forest of Thoughts, a sprawling spatial archive of over 100 projects arranged like undergrowth, each a branch of the Japanese architect’s genealogy. Visitors encounter recurring themes such as ‘open boundaries,’ ‘many, many, many,’ and the ‘amorphous,’ which together challenge rigid definitions of form and function.
At the heart of the exhibition is The Grand Ring for Expo 2025 Osaka, the architect’s most ambitious project to date. A 1:5 model of the world’s largest wooden structure, over four meters high, anchors the Open Circle section, supported by sketches, joinery mockups, and documentary footage. The circular form, enclosing and expanding, becomes Fujimoto’s architectural metaphor for belonging in a fragmented world. This theme resonates across projects like L’Arbre Blanc in Montpellier, with its leafy balconies spiraling outward like tree branches, or House of Music Hungary, which dissolves into a park as if architecture and landscape were never separate to begin with.
Forest of Thoughts, 2025
Architecture as Play, Experience, and Speculation
The retrospective unfolds with inventive curatorial gestures that combine architecture, performance, and storytelling. In Stuffed Architecture Talks, nine of Fujimoto’s iconic buildings take the form of plush toys, chatting with distinct personalities about their designs and contexts. Elsewhere, The Animated Forest uses projections to animate user movement through Fujimoto’s buildings, shifting the focus from object to experience.
Perhaps most provocatively, Resonant City 2025, developed with data scientist Hiroaki Miyata, visualizes a future metropolis of interlinked spheres hovering in layered space without a center. This speculative urban vision closes the exhibition with a question: What might architecture look like if shaped by multiplicity, not hierarchy? If cities could behave like forests, open, resilient, interconnected?
Primordial Future Forest is an architecture exhibition oriented toward what lies ahead. ‘Rather than focus on the past,’ shares Fujimoto, ‘this survey is firmly anchored in the present and looking toward the future.’
the exhibition proposes the forest as a metaphor for a new kind of urbanism
a sprawling spatial archive of over 100 projects arranged like undergrowth