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Prompting a flood of excuses from the gallery staff, a rhetorical question was posed by a woman in the audience at the end of the public talk given by Sou Fujimoto, at this year’s Serpentine Gallery summer pavilion.

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She remarked how wonderful it was that the Japanese architect's open structure invited people to be free, that people were encouraged to climb over it and children to dangle off from it, and yet at the same time, people were chased off the lawn: so, she said almost breathlessly, how did the architect's philosophy influence the Gallery's own attitude?

Although this year's pavilion has received universal praise from the critics, with even the most acerbic ones forced to admit to liking it, everyone, including the Serpentine, seems to be missing the point of this exercise. It may be 'a massive work of architectural branding,' as Jack Self rightly points out in his review of the pavilion in Domus, but Sou Fujimoto is already a brand in Japan. Now he is set to be a valuable architectural brand on this side of the world, too, and no doubt we will be seeing a lot more of his name in the press. But so what? The main purpose of these pavilions, as the woman at the talk was at pains to point out, is for people to simply enjoy the space.

For this very reason, I couldn't quite bring myself to like the somber, monastic - even pretentious - pavilion created by the otherwise great Swiss architect Peter Zumthor: one had to be informed enough to submit to the architect's particular thinking in order to 'get' it". Children were, naturally, bored by it. Bowing to the genius (or status) of their invited exhibitors, institutions seem somewhat averse to having fun and taking on any kind of risks - in my view, surely the greatest sin of all museums and galleries. Critics should jump at the opportunity to pan such timidity, and commend those who take a chance on engaging, if non-standard, exhibits.

At least, the 41-year-old Fujimoto is not risk-averse (that he is the youngest architect the Gallery has commissioned to date to design its summer pavilion seems to me of little significance; far more impressive is the fact he is already the third Japanese architect to be given the job since the series began in 2000). His appetite for having fun has mostly, and thankfully, survived intact in this project. If, however, our movements are restricted with sign posts everywhere keeping us off certain areas, or our reveries interrupted by the security guards' stern gaze, or if the concessionary balustrades get in the way of our earthy desire to explore the place on hands and knees, then the whiteness of the pavilion becomes less than white.

I have followed Fujimoto's work closely over the years; in March 2008, I interviewed him for Blueprint magazine, sharing some over-priced dim sums near the British Museum. After we finished our lunch, Fujimoto pointed out the disarray of empty plates left on our table and memorably noted, 'The chaos on the surface of this table is a result of some very natural activities... I want my buildings to be like this, with some unpredictability and ambiguity still intact.'

Fujimoto's work is all about relinquishing some of the control he gains as an architect or as a creator of buildings and places back to the people. His first project, the Rehabilitation Center for Mentally Disturbed Children, was a jumble of solid concrete boxes, assembled together in such a manner that gaps, alcoves and corners emerged as interesting junctures within. These pockets of space were not entirely cut off from the rest of the meandering double-height hallway but still cozy enough for the children to feel safe in and play, giving them the much-needed sense of autonomy. 'The meaning of a place,' the architect pointed out at a talk this year, 'is not determined by the architect but by people interacting with it.' It is hardly a surprise that Fujimoto has become weary of imposing more control on people, given that he is from Japan, where the hand of control manifests itself in almost every guise.

This year's pavilion has been compared to many things: a giant jungle gym, 'a 3D garden trellis on steroids' (Oliver Wainwright of the Guardian), or the funniest, 'Doozers' constructions from Fraggle Rock" (@duncancumming). The more poetic similes can be derived from nature, as the pavilion's press pack triumphantly does, describing the pavilion as 'mist rising from the undulations of the park.' Fujimoto himself often refers to nature when talking about his work. Although nothing is more annoying than when architects (particularly Japanese architects) resort to describing their work by referencing nature (trees, flowers, clouds, mist, the moon rising over a mountain, or what have you), I feel that in Fujimoto's case, it is slightly different. He refers not so much the distant, ephemeral beauty of nature, but the chaos, the randomness of nature, or the real, physical obstacles it imposes upon us. 'We must duck to avoid branches and are made to jump over the rocks and streams. These obstacles in nature heighten our awareness of space,' the architect says, smiling.

Back at his Serpentine offering, transparent glass panes fill some of the square gaps created by the hundreds of interlocking steel bars, transforming parts of the latticed structure into steps or seats. Climbing the structure, the Architect's Journal editor Christine Murray wonders, 'Is this what it would feel like to find your footing on a cloud?' The rest of the trellis-grid remains open to elements, while transcendentally branching off into ether.

The pavilion is required to provide some kind of shelter; in this case the 'roof' is made of overlapping transparent polycarbonate discs. Fujimoto admits that these discs don't quite prevent the rain coming into the structure. Would they produce a cascade of rainwater when the downpour starts (I have yet to see it in downpour), creating a beautiful marriage of opposites, like the fluid water and rigid structure of stones and concrete in Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater house? I tell him that all great buildings leak, quoting the American master. Fujimoto is still smiling.

As affable as he is, Fujimoto is an oddball in the contemporary Japanese architectural scene. He doesn't belong to any of the existing, hierarchically arranged 'lineages' of architects in Japan and seemingly avoids being pigeonholed. If you happen to see the influence of SANAA in this particular work, that's probably because the pavilion has been painted entirely in white, giving off a certain sense of minimal 'purity' often associated with SANAA's work. The affinity between Fujimoto and SANAA stops here, however. Or rather, it stops at the point where Kazuyo Sejima, one half of SANAA, and Fujimoto both end up citing the Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara - who is famous for his fantastic houses such the Tanikawa Residence built in 1974, with its mud-covered floor - as being a major influence for their work.

The Serpentine Gallery's pavilion is, in fact, a natural progression of Fujimoto's own work, such as the Final Wooden House, where he stack up massive blocks of timber to create an interior space 'clawed' by protruding wooden arms serving variously as table or chair, bookshelf or bed. Fujimoto told me an anecdote about Toyo Ito, who was on the jury panel for the Final Wooden House competition. Ito had already predicted that Fujimoto's design would leak at the submission stage; he, however, felt strongly that it didn't ultimately matter and decided that Fujimoto should win the competition. Toyo Ito was, coincidentally, the first Japanese architect to design the Gallery's summer pavilion in 2002. We should further note that it was in Ito's office that Kazuyo Sejima started her career. She was the second Japanese architect as part of SANAA to be commissioned to deliver a pavilion at the Serpentine in 2009.

That Fujimoto's father is a psychiatric doctor is telling. While his father helps to untangle knots in our minds, Fujimoto creates knots in space, only to untangle some of them and leave us to figure out the rest. Architecture, for him, is a tool to make sense of our place in the world, to exploit that potential. He sees everything as connected, and admits being influenced by Einstein's theory of relativity. Once, he says, he mistook the crisscrossing of the windowpanes of the Gallery to be part of his own pavilion, and in this way, it was revealed to him the effect that the surrounding environment has had on the design of his pavilion.

Personally, what I find most compelling is his ability to straddle both worlds - the cerebral and the sensual, the highbrow and the lowbrow - as well as the authentic (honmono) and the kitsch (ikamono), the age old distinction first made by the German architect Bruno Taut travelling in Japan before the onset of the Second World War (and itself a subject too fascinating and complicated to be delved into here in detail).

Fujimoto's pavilion is the best one yet precisely because it fails to be a shelter. And how liberating that is for all concerned! We can leap forward, jump up and step sideways, both physically and mentally, alongside our children. After all, a garden folly is a perfect setting to contemplate our own place in the world, the meaning of our existence. Fujimoto's is about discovering it in our own way, whilst on the move. You might get wet in doing so but never mind; dress casually, and have fun with it, which is, I assure you, the whole point of the exercise.

Yuki Sumner

@yukisumner

Yuki Sumner is a writer, critic, lecturer and curator with a special interest in contemporary Japanese architecture. Yuki has recently completed her Masters in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture. She is also author of New Architecture in Japan (Merrell Publishers, March 2010).