Origins of Spatial Feeling
From 2012 to 2016, I lived and studied in Tokyo. Before that, I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas—a place defined by wide skies, backyards, and the soft friction of suburbia. There, everything felt quiet and still, but not in a calming way. It was a quiet that hovered between comfort and constraint. Tokyo offered a sudden inversion: freedom through density, clarity in movement, anonymity as a form of belonging. Trains, vending machines, alleys, neon, all humming with purpose. I was drawn into architecture not through aesthetics alone, but through the lived experience of a city that seemed to respond—spatially, socially—to my desire for possibility.
Memory and Architecture
Juhani Pallasmaa once wrote that “the elements of architecture are not visual units or gestalt; they are encounters, confrontations that interact with memory.” That rings truer now than ever. Architecture isn’t just what we see—it’s what we remember, what we project onto it, and what it allows us to feel. The same wall that invites one person in may turn another away. Some inhabit buildings from the inside; others only see their surface. Like Gatsby staring at the green light, we sometimes look at architecture as something just out of reach—illuminated by hope, distorted by longing.
Revisiting Tokyo
I returned to Tokyo recently, years after leaving, and wandered through the city with a camera in hand. My intention was simple: to visit the Tokyo Toilet Project pavilions featured in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days. In the film, a quiet man named Hirayama tends to public toilets with grace, humility, and something close to reverence. The structures themselves—designed by the likes of Kengo Kuma and Nao Tamura—elevate the mundane into something poetic. A cedar-clad block in Nabeshima Shoto Park folds into the surrounding trees. A red steel blade near Ebisu reflects the street in slices of fragmented light. Each pavilion seems to ask: what if public space could also be sacred?
Finding Beauty in the Ordinary
I photographed these sites carefully. But as the days passed, I found myself drawn less to the polished, intentional works of architecture and more to the ordinary edges of the city: a patch of overgrown weeds behind a utility shed. An apartment wall overtaken by looping silver pipes. A canal path strewn with rusted signage.
These weren’t designed to be beautiful, but they were. There was a kind of spatial honesty in them—forms shaped by use, by time, by neglect and need. In them, I saw the rough texture of life. And in photographing them alongside the celebrated public pavilions, I felt the lines blur. What made one space ‘worthy’ and another invisible?
The Double Life of Buildings
Architecture has always had a double life. From one side, it is image, icon, symbol—something to be admired, photographed, published. From the other, it is background: lived in, worn down, sometimes unnoticed entirely. These layers don’t cancel each other out—they coexist, often in tension. As Walter Benjamin noted, cities are palimpsests, overwritten with memory and power. And like the flâneur, I wandered—not to possess the city again, but to be present within its contradictions.
A Return to Attention
The act of photographing became a way to reconcile these views: to place the pavilion and the pipe on equal footing. To see the value in what isn’t celebrated. To stop chasing spectacle and start paying attention to what’s around me.
I think often about Terunobu Fujimori—his embrace of eccentricity, of grounded materials, of the fantastical rooted in the earth. His work rejects the sterilized rationalism of modernism in favor of play, tactility, and myth. In his spirit, I tried to equalize the architectural field: not privileging icons over incidental poetry, but letting all environments sit on the same emotional plane.
Architecture as Mirror
Over time, I stopped searching for inspiration and started noticing presence. I found that what moved me wasn’t just a beautiful design, but a moment: sunlight hitting an old wall, a breeze through a steel grate, moss creeping up a stair. In these fragments, architecture returned—not as monument, but as mirror.
Maybe that’s all I’m doing now: trying to hold both views at once. The view from the outside, the imagined life within. The grand and the modest. The public and the personal. Buildings as thresholds we pass through, both physically and emotionally.
Conclusion: Felt, Not Just Built
In the end, these photographs are not of architecture, but of time spent in space. They are not about mastery, but memory. They are not about what was built, but what was felt.
And perhaps, that is enough.