Hiromi Fujii defines metamorphology not as superficial formal change but as the alteration of the conventions and codes through which architectural meaning is normally transmitted. His examples are precise: a column can cease to signify only support and instead intensify rotation, branching or cantilever; a cornice can stop concluding a classical composition and become an active agent of continuity or tension. The theoretical contribution is decisive because it relocates architectural invention from the production of unprecedented shapes to the mutation of relationships among familiar elements. Architecture becomes a machine for manipulating syntax, and meaning appears as an effect of rule transformation. Hajime Yatsuka’s parallel description of Fujii’s work as a transformation machine sharpens this point: once vocabulary and procedures are specified, the architect no longer determines every outcome in advance. The wider field is structuralism and post-structuralism, where codes are productive precisely because their transformations expose the contingency of what previously appeared natural or stable.
