The experience on the stairs in the Ando's early work "Rokko Housing" was also totally new for me. Every time people walk up the stairs, which means every time going up and down, they can arrive at a new space and see a new scene. I found how exiting going up the stairs is.

The experience this stairs gives is similar to what novel and movies give, it means that at the plot develops, a new evolution and a new scene are waiting. I think Ando is an architect who is truly good at developing scenes.

Like this, I realized how interesting and attractive architecture is. But I still had a question and still yearned for writing a novel at the time. I felt like continuing architecture, but I was not sure if studying architecture and writing a novel at once is an accurate idea. As I mentioned before, I thought like this; the difference between novel and architecture is just a way to approach, describing or designing, and the fact remains that both deal with space and scenery. I deepened such my conviction more and more after finding a feeling of vitality of space and an interest of developing a scene at the Ando's building. But I had no confidence.

Around that time, I found an essay by an architect, Hiroshi Hara, in a philosophic magazine, and it astonished me because the title of the essay was just "Architecture and Literature." Its first sentence was "Architecture and literature are very similar. In some ways, it could be said they are the identical."

At the time, Hiroshi Hara was also an architect who has mainly designed small residences. His own home is really attractive, and he showed this building with the massage "burying a city in a house." Actually it seems as if there is a city in the house.

Well, let's return to the Hiroshi Hara's text I found, "Architecture and Literature." He talks taking a poet, Shuntaro Tanikawa's works as an example in it. Tanikawa is one of the greatest poets in Japan, and the poem Hara quoted is as follows.

Hara says that this poem has structuring of place and time. With a central focus on a sensory organ of an ear, various places and times are given positions through a sense of "hearing."  It is an image.

If you have read books about phenomenology, especially written by Merleau Ponty, you could easily understand a structuration theory. Phenomenology is profound philosophy, so I do not explain the details this time. It is fine to understand it intuitively now, but I suggest studying it well later.

Hiroshi Hara refers to the novels of Garcia Marquez and Kenzaburo Oe as well. Marquez is an Argentine and Oe is a Japanese writer who received the Nobel Prize. Marquez created a space of a closed village and wrote about it in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (1967). Oe set in the valley where he was born and bred and characterized there as if a space which is possible to compete with the nation. Both Marquez and Oe use the narrative technique called "grotesque realism" which depicts a strange story with unreal persons as if realities. Marquez and Oe represent their stories using a power of space. For instance, Oe imagines a story which arises in consequence of a valley. The valley closes its entrance and becomes microcosm. The microcosm can be seen from the top of the valley. Oe described the story such a place produces.

Also Hara has researched in colonies in the world and found likely spaces to be in novels. He is a professor of the University of Tokyo and has conducted researches like this for years.

I was so impressed by his essay, and it encouraged my idea very much. I was assured of a similarity between architecture and literature.

Of course Hara does not guarantee the compatibility between writing a novel and designing a building as businesses, but I have already made up my mind to make a career in the fields of architecture and literature. I thought "if I will spend the rest of my life trying the both fields but failing, that might be just the way of it. I do not have any other things to do." After that, I have continued to study in my way such as reading books about semiotics and philosophy, seeing the architecture in countries all around the world, and so on. They are the architecture I have visited at that day. Then the world was in the midst of the postmodern movement, and Robert Ventui's architectural theory was getting attention. I have read his books with great interest, but in fact, the person who impresses me as an actual architect was Le Corbusier.

Well, I got into Hara's office after graduation from university. Around that time, he has begun to design larger scale buildings than houses such as "Tasaki Museum of Art" (1986) in Nagano and "Josei Elementary School" (1987) in Okinawa. I think we can find the results of his researches on colonies in this school. In his office, I took charge of design and construction managements of "Yamato International". Hara said that he tried to put a multi-layered structure practice.

Multi-layered structure is the structure found in landscape or our consciousness and means the state that several layers overlap relating each other.

While I have been working on this big project, I was writing a novel. As you know, an architect studio is a demanding workplace. Especially in Japan, staffs of an architect studio are almost slaveries. I was hellishly busy at the days, but I cut down on sleep and wrote a manuscript for 1 hour before going to bed. I have spent a year working on my novel and sent it to a literary magazine.

In Japan, people who aim to be a novelist generally send their manuscripts to literary magazines and debut by winning a new face prize. But it is highly competitive with only one chance in 1,500.

To my surprise, my novel won "Gunzo New Writer Award" when I was 26. My novel appeared in a magazine and was published as a book later. Additionally, other writers who came out from Gunzo are Haruki Murakami, Genichiro Takahashi, and so on.I was very lucky to get the state for writing novels finally. Also I got to know a lot of writers and architects due to the prize. I was very glad to come to know people who I respect;

Toyoo Ito who has published "Silver Hat" and designed "Sendai Mediatheque" lately.

 Osamu Ishiyama who has published "Gen An" and designed "Rias Arc Museum of Art" lately.

Shin Takamatsu who has published "Origin" and designed "Kirin Plaza Osaka" lately.

Around this time, I also came to know Kazuyo Sejima who was one of the staffs of Toyoo Ito's office. This picture is the Sejima's early work of residence named "Platform."

One of the judges when I got New Writer Award was Kojin Karatani who is a literary critic. He is a critic and also a thinker. He has deep interest in ideological side of architecture and has the book titled "Architecture as Metaphor."

In the late 1990s, he held the continuation meeting called "Any Series" with a French philosopher Jack Derrida and architects Arata isozaki and Peter Eisenman.

At the beginning of my career as a novelist, Karatani offered me to write a comment about architecture for a philosophical magazine. I would be afraid to receive the offer if it was a comment of architecture for an architectural magazine because it would seem to be an in-group closed statement. But I decided to write because I liked that it was for a philosophical magazine. The subject was Arata Isozaki. At the time, Isozaki has designed "Art Tower Mito" and has developed the architectural theory "Architecture with capital A." The logic of "Architecture with capital A" refers to the concept of "Subject with capital S" propounded by a psychologist Jacques Lacan.

To explain the Isozaki's logic simply, "What makes architecture stand as architecture is the history of architecture from ancient Greece era and is logicality established through that history. Unless architects refer to that, what they can produce is only building".  I rebutted this logic in my critique because it seemed that his works and architectural theories have become conservative in these days. Of course I make much of histories and theories, but his statements seemed something repressive which sets limit to any possibilities for me because I was thinking to approach architecture through the space of a novel.

I have criticized Isozaki, but Isozaki himself read and liked my comment very much. It means that he was tried to discuss it with me seriously, and this discussion became full of excitements.When I was 28, I became a teacher of Kyoto Seika University, and at 30, I had my own office. I did not have any jobs of a design, though.

So, I have held the exhibitions of architecture with Kazuyo Sejima, Sei Takeyama and others. This was the exhibition titled "Last Scene in Architecture."  I composed the gallery as a guest curator and made the installation art.

We have also submitted to the exhibition "Contemporary Architect Exhibition at Triennale NARA 1995".

In 1992, I wrote a story titled "The Future Topography" which was about that the guru of a cult group insists on changing the world with a dogma of "the endeavor to change topography." But in fact, the guru is bogus and suspected of murder. The story is as if predicting the actual case of Aum Shinrikyo which would happen a few years later.

This book was not a good seller, but Mr. Kenzaburo Oe showed his approval in a newspaper. I have begun to design small houses, but I did not see the way to produce the architecture as a novelist from the beginning. I gropingly tried to find the way little by little.

The keyword I first came up with was "theatrical."

If making a living space like a stage, a novel-like space might come out...  I thought so. And my idea was embodied in this "Sasai Residence".

Also I thought of making a living room like TV. I have tried to make a family look like characters in TV.I have planned not only these small projects but also big projects.

None of the big projects has come off yet, but I have made presentations of models like these to architectural magazines. What I was thinking in these projects was "the alienation of a scene." "Alienation" is a concept formed by Russian Formalism and developed into theatricalism in Germany. It is Verfremdung in German. By being put something alien in a daily life, unexpected stories would come out, or a daily life would begin to change... I considered whether such things were possible in architecture. I kept thinking of and trying such things but had no chance to realize them. Thoughts of architecture are trained through real projects. It is not to say that architects cannot think of anything without real projects, but they are important just the same. One of the reasons that I found few opportunities of real projects was that I do not have a good head for business, but another was that the slack social condition caused by the collapse of the bubble of Japanese economy has arisen at a stretch.

This bad economic condition not only reduced demands for construction but also took away the variations from architecture. In other words, the cheap style...  if the word "cheap" is not good, the stoic style was quickly popularized, and other styles could not be accepted... such a situation arose.

For example, this is the work of Waro Kishi. Mr. Kishi is an older friend of mine. I never think his architecture is bad. I like them. But the problem is that one and all have begun to imitate his style. Today if you open an architectural magazine in Japan, you would find a lot of buildings which are just like copies of his works.

And another problem is that these copy architecture just looks like stoic but is actually not stoic at all.

What they represent is the minimal style and not the minimal idea. Also they succeed to modernism just as a style and not to the fundamental problem of modernism.

I have already mentioned in this series of lecture, but potentialities of modernism were not in minimalism only like Mies's works.

I think that it is important to re-excavate potentialities of expressionism, futurism, formalism and others.

Anyway, I have designed the building "Exces" in 1998. Through designing of this building, I felt that I belatedly found the way to design the novel-like space. It is totally different from the trendy pseudo-stoic style, and a trend does not mean anything to me. What I am interested in is potentialities which come out by thinking of a novel and architecture at one time. Memory, life, history and future... I want to explore expressions of these things and do not care about trend.

Well, "Exces" has this kind of space structure.  This building is composed of a living space and a private supplemental school for a child. The client was a woman living with her only daughter. Her husband was an architect but died young in a traffic accident. Incidentally, that architect was my senior at university. I chose the daughter's room as what generates a story in the space of the house. She is the most important person for young mother and must have been so for deceased father. This house lacks the existence of father, but his existence is imagined through the daughter. I put the daughter's room in this elliptic space and placed it on the highest position in the house to be looked up from the living room. It must be seen as if floating in the sky.

The passage from the entrance leads to the daughter's room. Person who follows this passage finally finds this daughter's room seeing various scenes such as a class room, a town and a kitchen on the way. I thought I could express the story this family has with this passage. Making up a form to induce the story, setting up a passage to it and developing scenes...

In other words, a fictional (novel-like) architecture could be produced by designing a form, scenes and a passage?

Such a potential came into my sight at last by designing "Exces." I do not think that all the method has succeeded in "Exces", but then I congratulated myself on finding the method finally.

A postmodern architect Toyokazu Watanabe saw into my view of this building and appreciated it. Mr. Watanabe designs this kind of architecture and has an eccentric character, so I do not know whether I should accept his compliment gratefully.

I found the method in this way, but after that, I again lacked the opportunity to have real projects.

Last year I finally produced a new building, but it was the tough project to build a house with a whopping tight budget, only $40,000. The client of this house was a nonfiction writer, and he would live here alone. The budged was really tight, but I was thinking to create something interesting building by making use of this condition.

My ideas were as follows.

First idea was to make the house minimum spatially. Something like Domino System advocated by Le Corbusier might be useful for it. Second idea was to use temporary details which derived from the tight budged.

To be specific, to employ materials and details used for construction works or so.

This kind of details would tell the underlying thought of this architecture.

At the same time, it would be a criticism of architectural thought which regards completion as the sovereign concept.

Third, this building must be what expresses the life of the client who is a　nonfiction writer.

Entering at the door, the social sight once retires, and only the light comes into the inside. Going up the stairs, the space with the outside view finally appears.

I tried to express the story of the nonfiction writer on this passage.

Finally, my students and I have been involved in the construction of this house. I tried to produce a low-price building using a semi-self build construction method. Additionally I saw it this way. Today a lot of people build their own computers. If so, there must be a method to buy the parts and assemble the pieces in the field of architecture as well.

This building came off like this.

After this building, I do not have any opportunity of real projects again. But I am not pessimistic about it so much.

As I told you at the beginning, I am designing the architecture of the film and am writing its story. This was drawn by my student, K-ichiro.

Through this kind of projects, I will be able to pursue the theme of architecture and literature. I could find this lifelong theme when I was a student like you. Even now, I think it was very lucky. Please find themes which you will spend the rest of your life seeking for, and I hope you will.

Thank you for your kind attention.