Takashi Yamaguchi & Associates

To Awaken a New Place

Architectural creation is an act of breaking down the totality of elements—time, history, tradition, and so forth—that exist in a place, in order to reunite those elements in a world of new meaning. When inserted in its place, the new architecture and the meaning it embodies transform the existing meaning with their presence. Indeed, the history of architecture is nothing more than an endlessly evolving repetition of such reunification.

Image embodiment is the process by which the elements of a place are reunited to produce a new world.

Place can be defined as a condensation of human activities, activities which seek development in a spatial form. Through spatial development, human activities obtain physical embodiment. A building is the result of this process.

For me, architectural thinking means contemplating all human actions. Architectural thinking is a philosophy that reflects my own values concerning how people should live. The built architecture is nothing other than a crystallization of this thinking. Thought takes form as image; its figure is visually expressed.

An image is simply an image and doesn’t exist in reality; yet when an image becomes a vision, it obtains an awesome power to transform reality. A vision seeks its optimum form—its ultimate point of development—in order to find realization in substance. To guide the vision in that direction demands more thinking.

Design is a further act of embodiment in the process of taking the image to physical realization. The image seeks a clearer expression of its figure in concrete terms of dimensions and materials, and the envisioned architecture adjusts to reality and becomes rooted in its site. The aim, in this stage, is to achieve a realization through a confrontation with reality.

The part seeks its natural position within its relationship with the whole and achieves integration. The whole determines the parts and the parts determine the whole. Dream and reality, exterior place and interior space, periphery and center—architecture attains physical embodiment as a crystallization of thinking that has considered such relationships from their reciprocal vantage points.

Architecture exists not as an end in itself but rather to give new life, with its existence, to the totality of its place.