In a small bookstore in my hometown, Kagoshima

object: CONCENTS (1998)

Lately, I've been revisiting things I didn't understand back then.

At the time, information about architecture and spatial design wasn't widely available to the public, and it certainly wasn't as open an industry as it is today. For me, the closest connections were my father building our house when I was in second grade, and the fact that we had a drafting table at home because he worked in some kind of design field for a while.

Obsessed with soccer from third grade onwards, in my first year of high school, I happened to stop by a bookstore in my hometown (Kagoshima) and picked up an architecture magazine called 'a+u'. That issue featured Mario Botta, a Swiss architect. Despite my best efforts to read it, much of the text was completely incomprehensible to me then, and I had no idea what the structures depicted were. However, it fit perfectly with my then-held notion that 'artistic things = difficult to understand'.

It's a common story, but I had always prided myself on being good at art since childhood, and I was also good at math and physics, so intuitively I felt, 'This is it...'. The magazine showcased various projects: houses and factories, of course, but also stage sets for 'The Nutcracker'… At the time, I only thought of architects as people who designed buildings, so I was astonished. The slightly out-of-focus black-and-white photos and the architect's own sketches left an immeasurable impact on me. It felt incredibly mysterious. Though vague, it was the moment my feelings for this profession solidified.

object: RECORD BENCH (2004)