Rock solid: the work of Sou Fujimoto gains strength and maturity.

Sou Fujimoto first appeared in the AR in late 2005 with two projects featured in the Awards for Emerging Architecture (AR December 2005). The following year he was one of three prizewinners with his Children's Treatment Centre in Hokkaido, featured alongside his highly commended 7/2 House, that together provided care and respite for children and their parents (AR December 2006). In all four projects, the architect was introduced as a protagonist of neo-primitivism, searching out new geometric order, composition and sequence, through manipulation of basic building blocks.

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Prolific and quietly ambitious, Fujimoto is without doubt one of Japan's most promising young architects, first coming to prominence in Japan in 2000 at the age of 29 as runner up to Jun Aoki in the Aomori Museum of Art competition. Since then, now working with 10 assistants, the extent of his output is manifest by the hundreds upon hundreds of models that fill his cramped basement studio in Tokyo, each showing consistent sensitivity to form and territory. With larger scale work in development set to extend his already impressive portfolio of completed projects, and having won the respect of influential patrons such as Toyo Ito, much more should be expected in future. In his latest project, a private coastal house near Tateyama, we have an indication of what to expect, with his unswerving ambition for formal experimentation, moderated by maturity, control and restraint.

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Situated on the Tateyama coastline, two or three hours' drive from central Tokyo, the house exhibits Fujimoto's trademark use of simple forms. In response to the client's wish to make the most of the stunning panorama, the strategy started out as a single linear form stretched across the full width of the site. Thinking they knew what they wanted, the client had asked Fujimoto for a simple box facing the sea. Understanding the view to be much more than a single experience, however, the architect had more specific ideas and started to manipulate the form and assemble the masses to control long views, intermediate vistas and a carefully choreographed step by step spatial sequence. The form therefore evolved from simple bar to near right-angled ranges, and finally to a composition of branches, where both the nearby craggy rocks and irregular water inlet had their influence. In discussions with the client, the architect's models revealed other key views in the foreground as well as those on the more distant horizon.

Gradation of space is one of Fujimoto's key concerns in his ongoing search for new geometries and new order, and in this house the 3m wide section shifts on site to create greater depth and incident in plan with each crook and crank. On such an expansive site, the building succeeds in creating much more than the pure Miesian box that the client first requested. In material too, the house has more substance. Recalling T-house (AR December 2005) where Fujimoto's use of painted and unpainted timber walls gave adjacent spaces identity within a single interior, a similar duality exists here, but in concrete. While using larger panels of rough formwork on the exterior, interiors are defined by more precise and pristine cast surfaces. Unified as a single monolith, this subtle shift acknowledges each wall's response to nature and man, with the heavier texture resonating with the rocks outside, compared with the more tactile and human scale internally, created by casting concrete against 45mm Japanese cedar boards.

Exploring the building en-route, the floor surface also expresses the transition from wild exterior to controlled interior. With bathrooms and bedrooms situated on either side of the jagged spine, when moving from courtyard and entrance hall set on stone, across white painted timber, the procession terminates on tatami; a fitting climax to the route with tatami providing the ultimate motif, smell and texture of a truly Japanese interior. Above this the roof is kept to its absolute minimum in fine steel plate. Services too are reduced, integrated into floor and walls with finesse, succeeding in discretion where so many other potentially beautiful Japanese interiors are polluted with bolt on air-conditioning units and unsightly utilitarian fittings.

While few details are articulated, with frameless 15mm single-glazed walls and double leaf doors set flush with internal and external concrete surfaces to maintain the illusion of mass, Fujimoto allows one solitary moment of expression with the heavily framed front door. As the only frame in the entire building, set within a glass screen, dark timber wraps around the door head cill and jambs with a consistent section. With this the door responds to the scale of the human, without diminishing the principal architectural relationship between concrete and glass. In its strategy and detail, O-house is rigorous and robust. If Fujimoto can maintain this degree of precision in thought and execution on larger projects, there will be much to look forward to.

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