Towards a Delightful Architecture with Nature

In the face of accelerating climate crisis, resource depletion, and the transition toward post-growth societies, architecture must move beyond technical sustainability and reconsider its fundamental relationship with nature. This lecture explores the possibility of a “delightful architecture with nature” — an approach that integrates environmental performance, circular material cycles, and vernacular knowledge into contemporary practice.

Recent works range from materially grounded, body-centered spaces using earth and timber, to circular building processes that reorganize salvaged and regional resources, as well as the transformation of collective housing in urban contexts. Through passive environmental strategies, adaptable construction systems, and participatory processes, architecture is positioned as an active node within ecological and material cycles.

These practices reframe sustainability not as a constraint, but as a spatial and cultural opportunity. Through light and wind, materials and tectonics, and the engagement of inhabitants, architecture can act as a mediator that reconnects human habitation with natural systems. The lecture proposes that sustainability must be inseparable from delight.

Norihisa Kawashima is a Japanese architect, Associate Professor at Meiji University in Tokyo, and Principal of Nori Architects. He also serves as Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

He received his Bachelor (2005) and Master of Engineering (2007) from the University of Tokyo. From 2007 to 2014, he worked at Nikken Sekkei Ltd. In 2012, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his PhD in Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 2016. After serving as Assistant Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, he joined Meiji University.

His work investigates how architecture can operate as an active node within ecological and material cycles, translating vernacular knowledge into contemporary urban contexts through spatial, material, and environmental strategies.

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