During my high school years in the United States, I returned to Japan for two summers and had the opportunity to live and train under the ceramic artist Junji Nomura in Ureshino, Saga Prefecture. This experience became the starting point of my aspiration toward crafting.

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At the time, he was creating tea bowls for children, quietly reflecting how they would fit small hands and how their proportions—especially the relationship between the bowl and its foot—could make them stable and less prone to tipping. Watching him at the potter’s wheel, fully immersed in such considerations, left a profound impression on me as a living embodiment of the dignity and sincerity of craftsmanship. His unwavering commitment to creating works for his “neighbors,” attentively responding to each individual’s sensibility over decades, has become the philosophical foundation of how I approach architecture today.

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Looking down from an airplane window, a city appears like a vast living organism spreading over the surface of the earth. As the plane gradually descends, the image gains resolution, revealing villages, towns, and eventually individual buildings. With this shift in perception comes a sense of overwhelm from the incomprehensible fact that, within these countless buildings exist daily lives, no two of which are the same.  However, it is soon taken over by a quiet hope, which is to make our cities, and by extension our society, a better place is not a matter of confronting this immense organism from a detached, panoramic viewpoint. Rather, it lies in enriching the lives immediately before us, through the sensibilities unique to each individual.

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The name of the studio, 4_1 (for one), expresses a design philosophy rooted in the perspective and scale of an individual—an approach that seeks to stay close to the life and sensibility of each user. Like a ceramic made with fond care for a neighbor, we aspire to create spaces that remain in memory as warm, tactile experiences perceived through all senses.