Hara sits at one of the broad desks covered with papers, books and pencils. He lights a cigarette and the smoke climbs up his long white hair, which adds to his appearance as a modern-day shaman or aged Hollywood actor. On the wall are works by American wrap-artist Christo, who is friends with Hara. Originally, Christo wanted to package something much bigger: Hara’s Umeda Sky Building in Osaka, with its two forty-floor landmark towers connected by escalators suspended in midair. But since the necessary funds never materialized, Christo resigned himself to wrap up one of his friend’s office telephones instead.

Talking about his life’s work, Hara expresses wonderment and finds it amusing that he, a proclaimed child of the ’60s revolution, has turned out monuments of gigantean proportions, like Kyoto Station or Sapporo Dome. Success, however, never changed him as a person; the global nomad, the Third World country vagabond. On the contrary, it only fortified his belief that if an urban area fails today, it is because the wisdom of ancient village structures has been violated in one way or another. Besides that, ancient design can look quite modern, too: in the ’50s, when American spy satellites took photos of the seven-hundred-year-old Tian Luo Keng earth houses, scientists mistook them for Chinese nuclear reactors.

ROLAND HAGENBERG  You visited and studied villages in fifty countries all over the world. How did that influence your work?

HIROSHI HARA  I’m interested in collecting traditional ideas from villages. I keep a travel diary, make notes, but I don’t copy. I translate historical notions into a modern style. I try to find out why certain things were the best solution at the time they originated. The essence of that I translate into modern thinking.

RHWhich village would you choose if you were forced to go into an architectural exile?