Latest news with #Fujimoto
CNN
11-04-2025
- CNN
Architect Sou Fujimoto: Expo 2025 is ‘a precious opportunity to come together'
Ever since the Great Exhibition opened its doors in London 174 years ago, the World's Fair has offered nations a chance to show off the greatest inventions of the age. But Expos of recent decades have been as much about diplomacy and public relations as innovation. It is little surprise, therefore, that the mastermind behind Expo 2025 — which commences this weekend in Osaka, Japan, just three years after the end of Dubai's Covid-delayed Expo 2020 — doesn't express his vision in terms of scientific or industrial progress. In an era of increasing conflict, the message is all about unity. 'The whole global situation is very unstable,' said Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, touring CNN around the site ahead of Saturday's opening ceremony. 'I believe this is a really precious opportunity to show (that) so many countries can come together in one place and think about our future together.' Japan hopes to welcome 28 million visitors to the event between now and mid-October. Designed by Fujimoto on a 960-acre artificial island in Osaka Bay, the site will host over 150 pavilions showcasing new technology, design concepts and multimedia exhibitions under the theme 'Designing Future Society for Our Lives.' Among them are dozens of national entries, from the serenely minimalist US pavilion to the corkscrew-shaped Czech one. The main attraction, however, is the venue itself: Fujimoto's Grand Ring, a continuous wooden structure, more than 1.2 miles in circumference, encircling much of the Expo. Made from Japanese cedar and cypress (as well as Scottish pine), it now holds the Guinness World Record for the world's largest wooden architectural structure. The Grand Ring is symbol of unity, too, Fujimoto said. And while it serves a functional purpose as a pedestrian route around the site, while protecting visitors from rain and sun, the structure was also designed to demonstrate the possibilities of timber as a viable alternative to carbon-intensive concrete. 'At the beginning, nobody believed it was possible,' Fujimoto said, describing the technical challenges of building with wood at such scale as 'so huge.' The use of wood in large structures, even skyscrapers, has accelerated in recent years. It's a trend spurred by the development of advanced 'mass timber' — typically made by gluing layers of compressed wood into strong columns or panels — and progressive building codes and policies promoting its use (France, for instance, now requires all new public buildings to include at least 50% wood). Related article World's first wooden satellite, developed in Japan, heads to space Engineered timber nonetheless remains novel in much of the world. But Japan has a long and continuous history of wooden architecture. The devastating earthquakes of 1891 and 1923 exposed the shortcomings of then-popular European-style brick and stone buildings. Today, around 90% of Japan's single-family homes are built using timber frames, which are better equipped to withstand quakes. As such, Fujimoto's Grand Ring looks both to the material's future and its past. He combined modern construction methods (including steel reinforcement) with interlocking joints inspired by those traditionally used in Shinto temples and shrines. These joints required exhaustive study, with mockups made and stress-tested — sometimes to the point of destruction — to ensure their durability and seismic resistance. Fujimoto believes his country can remain a world leader in timber construction. It is a movement he has pioneered, alongside architectural luminaries like Shigeru Ban and Toyo Ito, since his eponymous firm's breakout project: a home in Kumamoto, completed in 2008 and named Final Wooden House, that resembles an oversized Jenga tower. 'We have such a wonderful tradition of wooden construction,' Fujimoto said. 'And also, really wonderful craftsmanship from more than 1,000 years ago. So now, we can combine that kind of tradition with the latest technology to create the future of sustainable architecture.' The road to Expo 2025 has been, at times, bumpy for Japan. Venue construction costs have ballooned from an initial estimate of 125 billion yen ($852 million) to 235 billion yen ($1.6 billion). Public interest has meanwhile proven lukewarm, with Osaka's governor Hirofumi Yoshimura last month admitting that the city was struggling to meet its advance ticket sale targets. On both matters, Fujimoto struck a diplomatic note. He described the final costs as the 'proper price, not too high, not too low,' while expressing hope for growing 'passions and energetic interest' from the Japanese public. 'The atmosphere is changing now,' he added. 'So, I'm optimistic about it.' While Fujimoto can justifiably distance himself from blame, there is another controversy to which he is more intimately tied: the fate of the Grand Ring. Whether, or how much of, the structure will live on after the Expo is a matter of ongoing debate in Japan. It is also a bone of contention among critics who believe that dismantling the structure would undermine its message of sustainability. Regardless of his wish that nothing goes to waste, the architect realizes that the decision may hinge on the funding required for upkeep and future events. 'I, myself, (would) really like to keep it — to preserve it … because it is really wonderful, and it is like a symbol of how our society can live together with nature,' he said. Yet, Fujimoto also notes that impermanence has always been a feature of Japanese architecture. Traditionally, the country's wooden homes were constructed with an expected lifespan of 20 years, and many Japanese people would sooner rebuild their house than renovate it. Some of Shintoism's most important structures, including the famous Ise Grand Shrine, have been regularly torn down and rebuilt over the centuries, posing a philosophical question — akin to the ship of Theseus paradox — of whether a building is more than the sum of its material parts. Related article 11 architecture projects set to shape the world in 2025 The architect implored that, should the Grand Ring be dismantled, its wood is repurposed in other projects. Then, 'even though the building is gone, the life or spirit of the materials will still be alive,' he said. In any case, the legacy he envisaged for the Expo is an intangible one: 'Amazing memories and surprising experiences that inspire (visitors) to create something for the future.' One of Japan's most celebrated living architects, Fujimoto was an obvious choice for Expo organizers. As well as practicing widely in Japan, the 53-year-old has become internationally renowned since being asked to design a temporary pavilion at London's Serpentine Gallery, one of architecture's most prestigious commissions, in 2013. Other recent high-profile projects include the striking L'Arbre Blanc ('The White Tree') residential tower in Montpellier, France, and the House of Hungarian Music, an airy arts venue whose perforated dome sits nestled among trees in a Budapest park. Both projects are emblematic of Fujimoto's architectural philosophy, dubbed 'primitive future,' which explores the symbiotic links between people, design and the environment. It's an outlook he has often attributed to his upbringing, amid nature, in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island. Fittingly, greenery is woven throughout his Expo 2025 design. '(We) couldn't live without nature,' he said, adding that the site should 'show how we can be together with the cycle of nature.' At the heart of this year's expo lies the 'Forest of Tranquility,' a congregation of around 1,500 trees, including native species like Japanese blue oak, Japanese maple and Japanese snowbell. Among them are trees replanted from Expo '70's Commemorative Park, some 13 miles northeast of the site, which serves as a permanent reminder of the last time Osaka hosted the World's Fair. Architecturally, much has changed in the intervening 55 years. Expo '70, held the year after the moon landing, played out under a giant 'space frame' roof and exhibited a moon rock brought back to Earth by Apollo 12. The event's lead designer, the late avant-garde architect Kenzo Tange, was known for conceptual floating cities and grand, outlandish megastructures. Related article Pritzker Prize 2025: China's Liu Jiakun awarded 'Nobel of architecture' Fujimoto described the event as 'a glorious moment of Japan in the 20th century,' but emphasized the difference between his Grand Ring and his predecessor's centerpiece design: 'Kenzo Tange's roof represented technology and industry… but our ring is made from wood and is a symbol of sustainability.' Japan itself has also transformed since the previous Osaka Expo, an event alive with the hopes of post-World War II social reinvention. For Fujimoto, not all this change has been for the better. As such, his call for unity at Expo 2025 appears to be directed as much toward his compatriots as the world at large. 'Japanese society is getting rather conservative and not so open,' he said. '(It is) rather closed to other countries and cultures… So, I believe this is a wonderful occasion (to) reconnect Japanese culture to the world.' CNN's Hazel Pfeifer, Yumi Asada and Daniel Campisi contributed to this story.
Yahoo
07-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
We May Have Finally Laid Eyes on The Universe's Very First Stars
Once, there was a time before stars. In the primordial darkness, after the Big Bang, nothing drifted but a vast sea of hydrogen and helium. It wasn't until stars came along, born from crushing densities in that clumping gas, that heavier elements emerged, forged by the fusion in their powerful hearts. Or so scientists believe. We've never actually seen those first stars, known as Population III stars. A new paper may finally change that. In a preprint submitted to The Astrophysical Journal and uploaded to arXiv, a large international team of astronomers led by Seiji Fujimoto of the University of Texas at Austin has described what they think might be a galaxy in the early Universe rich in these elusive objects. This galaxy, called GLIMPSE-16403, is by no means confirmed as a Population III host. But the identification of even a candidate suggests that it's only a matter of time before we finally locate the first stars in the Universe. "This work paves a clear path for the discovery of the first Pop III galaxies," the researchers write. "Whatever the fate of the present candidates, the methods developed in this study will empower Pop III galaxy searches throughout the JWST era." The Cosmic Dawn is what we call the era that spans the first billion or so years after the Big Bang popped the Universe into existence some 13.8 billion years ago. During this time, the cosmos came together from a hot quark-gluon plasma that filled the Universe in its first moments, forming stars and galaxies that literally swept away the darkness with their blazing light. Those first Population III stars were a vital step towards the Universe we see around us today. Elements heavier than hydrogen and helium can only be created by extreme processes such as core fusion and nova explosions. Yet previous research has only yielded second-hand traces of these first generation stars, not the objects themselves. Astronomers believe that this is because Population III stars may have been particularly massive, larger than any stars around in the more recent Universe. Larger stars live much, much shorter lives than smaller ones, so those first stars may have long flickered out, leaving behind only the elements they fused in their cores to be taken up by subsequent stellar generations. Cosmologists and astronomers desperately want to see what those early stars were like. They want to find out how the lights turned on in the Cosmic Dawn, clearing the neutral hydrogen fog that rendered space opaque. Our best shot for this is JWST, the most powerful space telescope ever built, optimized for peering farther back into the early Universe than any telescope before with its infrared-sensitive eye. Seeing into the Cosmic Dawn is hard enough, but looking for a needle in that particular haystack is even harder. Fujimoto and his colleagues figured they could expedite the search by looking very, very closely at only small regions of the sky, looking for the chemical fingerprints of Population III stars. The researchers focused their efforts on galaxies with powerful hydrogen and helium emission spectra, and little evidence of other elements. Their pipeline yielded two candidates. One was only tentative; but the other, GLIMPSE-16403, hanging out in the Cosmic Dawn around 825 million years after the Big Bang, met all the criteria the researchers had specified for a Population III galaxy. This makes the galaxy the best candidate to date for finding the stars that switched on the lights in the Universe. More work will need to be done to determine the nature of the stars in GLIMPSE-16403, which might be tricky; we'd need a detailed spectrum, and that's not easy to obtain across such vast gulfs of space-time. Nevertheless, the discovery is an incredibly exciting one: the detection of Population III stars now feels like it's right around the next corner. "Exactly a hundred years ago, our cosmic horizon expanded past the edges of the Milky Way for the first time, with Andromeda and Triangulum marking the boundaries of our place in the Universe," the researchers write. "As we reflect on the profound discoveries of the last hundred years, it is intriguing to consider how those early surveyors of glass plates would view the prospect that we may soon detect the Universe's very first stars." The team's paper has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, and is available on arXiv. Record Discovery: Impact Crater in Australia's Outback Oldest by a Billion Years Intuitive Machines' Second Lunar Lander Touches Down, But Something Feels Familiar NASA Is Planning to Shut Down Another Piece of Voyager 2
Los Angeles Times
20-02-2025
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
Looking for utter relaxation? Here are 6 of the best head spas in L.A.
I settled into a salon chair at Head Spa Nagomi while my practitioner, Kai Fujimoto, wove a tiny digital camera through my wet hair. It provided a 230-times-magnified view of my scalp on a nearby laptop screen. There, my noggin glistened, its dimpled, moon-like surface studded with swaying, dark-amber stalks: my individual hairs and their follicles. 'This is an ideal condition — literally, a dream scalp,' Fujimoto said, beaming victoriously at the results of the treatment he'd just administered. This had been my third head spa treatment of the week — for research, of course. No wonder my scalp was so squeaky clean. Luxurious Chinese and Japanese-inspired 'head spa' treatments began gaining popularity on social media in 2022. Videos of scalp-scrubbings amid plumes of aromatic steam and an arc-shaped 'waterfall bath' teased an enthralling spa experience that some influencers claimed would 'change your life.' Head spas generally offer a detailed scalp analysis, repeated deep cleanses, hydrating treatments and various forms of head and neck massages. They're all slightly different, however, with unique touches — an herbal foot bath at one, full body massage tables at another, wind chimes dangled over your head at the next. Practitioners claim the treatment offers myriad health benefits. The scalp is the 'soil' from which the hair grows, they say, and nourished soil produces healthier hair. The treatment isn't a cure-all for conditions such as psoriasis or eczema, doctors tell me, but it does detoxify and hydrate the skin. And repeated scalp scrubbing aids circulation, bringing blood flow and nutrients to the area. All of which strengthens hair follicles and can help prevent dandruff, itchiness, inflammation and, possibly, hair loss. Scalp treatments have been popular for centuries in many parts of Asia, including in Vietnam and Korea as well as China and Japan. But as of 2021, there were only a few head spas in L.A., including San Gabriel's Cai Xiang Ge, which opened that year, and Blow Me Away Organic Hair Salon and Head Spa, which opened in the Beverly Glen area in 2016. The trend proliferated in late 2022, largely due to momentum on social media, in Asian communities such as Arcadia, San Gabriel, Temple City and Rosemead. Now there are head spas scattered all over town, and existing locations are expanding. Cai Xiang Ge is debuting a Beverly Hills location in April; Tou Dao Tang, in Temple City, is expanding to Glendale this spring; Yang Si Guan (a.k.a. PureLux Scalp SPA) in San Gabriel, West Hollywood and Irvine is opening Pasadena and Newport Beach locations later this year. And there are still head spas on my list to visit. Newcomers include Brainwashed LA in Sherman Oaks, ResetSpot in Burbank and Fujimoto's Aqua Lucca Head Spa in West Hollywood. 'It's hit peak popularity,' says Michelle Yehuda, owner of Brainwashed LA, which opened last February. 'People are realizing your scalp is something you need to take care of. It's not something we were taught growing up. But also, it's very relaxing — we hold so much stress in our head and shoulders. A lot of my clients just doze off.' I went on a head spa marathon, visiting so many establishments in succession that my head felt tender by the end. These are six of our favorite places in L.A. to experience the trend. Each has a distinctly unique take. SkinGuru Spa feels more like an aesthetician's studio while Head Spa En is reminiscent of a luxury hair salon; Head Spa Nagomi offers authentic Japanese touches while Cai Xiang Ge incorporates traditional Chinese modalities; M Head Spa is luxuriously massage-forward while Tou Dao Tang, with its use of organic herbs, has an especially down-to-earth vibe. Whichever head spa you choose, there's an almost primal comfort in having your head lovingly, meticulously cared for by another human being.
