Mount Fuji Architects Builds a Headquarters With No Fixed Outline

Mount Fuji Architects Studio has completed the STROOG headquarters in Toyama, Japan: a 499-square-meter structural system built entirely from interlocking cross-laminated timber panels, designed to operate without a fixed outline or a grid module.

The project is the Tokyo firm's most explicit answer to a question its architects have pursued for years. "For some time, I have been wondering whether it might be possible to create an architectural system without a fixed, predetermined outline—one that remains open and flexible with regard to both space and time," the studio writes in its project text, published September 24, 2026 on ArchDaily.

The stated target is Le Corbusier's Dom-ino system, the repeatable column-and-slab frame that underwrote twentieth-century construction. In the architects' reading, its freedom is conditional. "Despite the freedom it is said to offer, it ultimately relies on the absolute unit of the grid module, which seems to be founded on the idea that people are fundamentally homogeneous," the text states. "The feeling that this evokes—of being forced into a predetermined framework—has always made me uneasy."

The alternative did not appear fully formed. Two earlier projects—House in Tateyama, the home of STROOG's representative, and its successor LIAMFUJI—used laminated timber members large enough for an entire wall to be formed from a single piece. Those massive walls double as beams. Their ample bending strength and wide connection joints free successive floor layouts from the conventional grid, letting spaces connect through new sectional relationships. But the plan still followed a grid, and the spatial organization was already fixed at the outset.

The STROOG headquarters breaks that residual order. The solution: a series of CLT panels, all 3,000 millimeters wide but of varying lengths, with slots cut wherever required and assembled into an interlocking lattice using a knock-down construction method. Because CLT has strong axes in two perpendicular directions, every member can act as a column resisting vertical loads and as a beam resisting horizontal forces. Because the material consists of solid timber laminations, the slots can be cut at virtually any position, to the nearest millimeter. The depth at which the slots engage sets the structural span of each joint, producing rigid frames through what the architects call "an inherently rational structural logic."

The resulting space mirrors its own construction. Spaces with distinct directional qualities intersect at right angles—much like the CLT laminations themselves—then link through diagonal relationships that cut across them. A sense of place emerges from two overlapping conditions: the non-uniform relationships between those spaces, and the atmosphere generated by the physical mass of the CLT itself.

Crucially, the architects refuse to call the system complete. Rather than terminating at a fixed outline, its edges are "allowed to fray into further spatial and temporal possibilities." Like a living organism, it can continue to grow and adapt to changing needs and shifting environments.

The claim is a pointed one: a framework that "inherits the universality of Dom-ino while evolving into a living system capable of generating a richer diversity of places for people to inhabit." Whether a slotted-CLT lattice can achieve the industrial ubiquity of concrete frame construction remains unproven. As the third iteration of a system still in active development, STROOG headquarters suggests Mount Fuji Architects Studio intends to keep testing it.