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Sou Fujimoto is the Japanese architect who brought a cloud composed of thousands of white, steel rods to Kensington Gardens in London. Now he’s created a waterfall in glass in Miami

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Words Caroline Roux

Until recently, Miami wasn't exactly a crucible of great architecture. Its famous art deco buildings are mostly blind boxes with fancy facades. A series of seaview, residential towers from the last decade were dictated more by developers' bottom lines than any design ideals. But recently that has begun to change. In 2010, there was the Herzog and de Meuron car park at 1111 Lincoln Road -- a reminder, if any were needed, of how closely Miami is wedded to the automobile. Frank Gehry's The New World Symphony building was completed a year later, and in 2013, the Perez Art Museum, another Herzog and de Meuron project that looks out to the water, and invites visitors to enjoy the shade offered by its generous overhangs dripping with vegetation.

This is Sou Fujimoto's first project in the United States. Photo: Robin Hill

Now, as the new buildings in the Design District begin to take shape, there are bigger surprises afoot, not least the arrival of a 30m-high arcade in blue glass that would provide pause for thought in any city. It will house a number of high-end jewellery stores, each with a unit plugged into the watery-blue, set-back facade. The work of Tokyo-based architect Sou Fujimoto, it is his first building in the United States and his most commercial project so far. 'It's also the first time I've ever used colour,' he says as we stood in its azure shade on a hot day in December. 'It was a major challenge on many levels.'

Fins of glass in five different shades of blue line the arcade. Photo: Robin Hill

The arcade, which Fujimoto calls Structural Waterfalls, is in the Design District's newly constructed Palm Court piazza. Its neighbours are equally attention grabbing: a new, two-floor event space by New York firm Aranda\Lasch, with decorative relief concrete walls, adjoins it; opposite, a newly opened Bulgari store has a facade fashioned in gold and silver plate. Out front, an enlarged facsimile of one of Buckminster Fuller's domes, the Fly's Eye, doubles as the entrance to the underground car park.

The arcade neighbours an enlarged facsimile of one of Buckminster Fuller's domes, the Fly's Eye. Photo: Robin Hill

But the Fujimoto building more than holds its own. 'I heard that Sou was very moved when he actually saw it,' says Craig Robins, the owner of DACRA, the co-developer of the Design District (the other partner is L Real Estate, the real estate arm of LVMH). 'That's a reality we don't focus on. The architect who's so far away, who comes and finds a finished product. It has to be emotional.'

When Sou Fujimoto made his first visit to Miami a few years ago, he was most struck by the weather: 'I was impressed by the beautiful sunlight, and then by the heavy rainfall that followed. That had a strong impact on me. I had the very basic idea, not just to provide a building, but also a corridor-like space with a roof, one that offered shade from sunlight and protection from rain, and that itself was about water, coolness and the sensations they bring.' So he went back to Tokyo and thought about it.

Fujimoto's cloud-like Serpentine Pavilion from 2013. Photo: Iwan Baan

Fujimoto is a patient man and for him, ideally, architecture is a slow process. He grew up on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, a region still dominated by nature; then he moved to Tokyo, and found himself fascinated by its man-made complexity. 'I always thought nature was more complex than architecture, but sometimes in Tokyo you find the man-made getting near that same level of complexity,' he says.

After he completed his architecture studies in Tokyo in 2001, Fujimoto spent five years negotiating architectural possibilities in his head, contemplating exactly what might be. 'It was a very conceptual time,' he says. His ruminations resulted in a desire to create what he considers to be a 'weak architecture', one that allows a synthesis with its surroundings, whether that's nature or the city, through transparency and porosity.

The Children's Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation in Hokkaido (2006). Photo: Daici Ano

Finally, when asked to design the annexes of a children's psychiatric rehabilitation hospital in Hokkaido by a friend of his father's (his father is an adult psychiatric doctor), he moved from concept to reality. 'I consulted a lot with the doctors for that project, and I concluded that the buildings should allow the children to do as they like,' he says. The result was a set of cubic buildings clustered in and responding to the landscape. 'It has the intimacy of the house and the variety of the city,' says Fujimoto of the programme.

The Children's Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation in Hokkaido (2006). Photo: Daici Ano

In 2013, aged 41, Fujimoto became the youngest architect to be asked to design the Serpentine Pavilion, an edition of which appears annually in London's Kensington Gardens. The gridded construction of thousands of white, powder-coated, steel rods was like a mechanical cloud floating in the subtly engineered landscape of the royal park. 'Architecture, but performing like nature,' he says. 'You could enter and leave at any point, wherever you wanted. Go up and down, or across.' In other words, the user, rather than the building, had the agency. 'It's all about place-making. Somewhere for people to use, to explore.'

Sacai (2011), a Tokyo store and Fujimoto's only other retail project. Photo: Sou Fujimoto Architects

The producers of the Serpentine Pavilion are a highly skilled crew, who've delivered a number of complex propositions over the years. One of them told me after the event that Fujimoto had been one of the most demanding architects they'd worked with.

I mentioned this to Craig Robins. 'Look, I respect architects who are extremely focused on the quality of their design and building,' he says. 'And Sou definitely has that characteristic. I'm not saying there was never a moment of tension, but it went smoothly overall. And look what we've got.'

Sacai (2011), a Tokyo store and Fujimoto's only other retail project. Photo: Sou Fujimoto Architects

In person Fujimoto is positively jolly: tall, smiling and always dressed in the latest Japanese fashions. Sacai is a favourite label - he designed the Tokyo store for its owner, the dynamic female fashion designer, Chitose Abe. 'That's my only other retail-related project,' he says of the shop which he inserted into a rundown old building in Aoyama as a series of boxes within boxes, so that framed views are continually revealed as customers move through the space.

The proposition in Miami couldn't be more different: one monumental facade that can accommodate many different retailers, each of whom will create their own framing device for their store. The Alchemist, for example, an upmarket Miami multi-brand, will have a rose-gold-coloured, mirrored exterior designed by local architect, Rene Gonzalez. 'We had to work out how to integrate so many different faces into one volume, because each brand will have its own character,' says Fujimoto.

His response has been to step back the principal facade behind the canopy, so everything is bathed in the unifying blue light filtered through the glass. The light also bleeds out into the courtyard, creating a real and atmospheric connection between the building and the open space it looks on to. 'It's very continuous,' says Fujimoto. 'It's about creating an ambiguity between what is inside and what is outside.'

In 2013, at the age of 41, Fujimoto was the youngest architect to design a Serpentine Pavilion. Photo: Johnny Tucker

The construction is explicit: I-beams, tension cables, but most conspicuously, the dramatic full-height fins of sandwiched glass, layered out of many shades from completely clear through four or five different depths of blue. 'We could have used aluminium,' says Fujimoto, 'but it's the layering that finally creates a different quality.' He also feels that glass better sums up the fancy nature of the product on sale.

The rest of the building is a big box - in keeping with Miami's architectural tradition. Fujimoto hadn't walked all around the outside, so we took a tour round the back, where it runs along the street. Fujimoto had originally proposed a similar cladding of blue glass fins. Instead the blank back wall has been exuberantly decorated in a black and white, Op art design. It's impressive, even if it does look like the world's biggest nightclub.

'It's different from my design,' says Fujimoto. 'But it's good, it's nice!' And he blinked in the strong Miami sunshine.