Daigo Ishii, Worldwide Tokyo-lization Project. Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

Think about a locality
In architectural history, various styles were generated and expanded to other areas from their place of birth. Such styles that had a nature to share might be regarded as Internationalism of some kind. In such Internationalism, nature in the original place was ranked as the authenticity that others should follow, and others had to add something to the authentic nature to differentiate them. Something that they adopted was a locality. There, the follower was an imitator and was evaluated lower than the original.
That is really correct?
If we change the standing point, would a different viewpoint not appear? The followers might achieve no metamorphosed version of the original but the re-interpretation of a locality by the new style brought from the outside. For example, should not the National Romantic in Scandinavia be positioned as the North European version of Art Nouveau instead of a progressive form of the local style re-interpreted by Art Nouveau? Would the 1960’s works by Kenzo Tange not be a Japanese digestion of Modernism imported onto the local style, or rather local style corresponding to the new scale and technology of Modernism?
House of Toilet is located at an isolated island in Japan. The composition between the island as a periphery and the main land or a big city as the center looks similar to the relation between the main house and a toilet separated from it in the island. However, the history shows that the island once had been a small center where a liner had directly connected with the capital, and it is the only place in Japan where locals speaks the capital dialect of that time even now. Through the design of House of Toilet, we intended to change a toilet as a peripheral place into the center of the island and to remind the island that it was the center.
At first, 11 slits of light crossed the building. 6 slits point in the direction from the island to 6 major cities on 6 continents. Those localize the coordinates of the island in space and make relative the big cities regarded as the center. Meanwhile, 5 slits of the rest show the solar orientation at 9:00 a.m. on the day of traditional ceremonies and the summer and winter solstices. Those localize the coordinates of the island in time and let locals know the visit of the season. Then, some of the island’s various landscapes, such as the inclination of a roof, color of the exterior wall, the type of finish, or the well for collecting a rain water, are reflected on the building with a delicate gap that makes aware the island’s identity for visitors and locals.
The final form was continuous with the locality and independent from it in the degree that they do not feel a sense of incongruity. House of Toilet is the re-interpretation of the locality, but it does not depend on Internationalism, but the locality itself to surpass the locality. We call this type of design Inter-Localism.
In a time when the world suffers for the spell of the Globalism, a way to match to it through architecture must be Inter-Localism, and architects utilizing this methodology appear in numerous places across the globe, connecting like a horizontal cloud.
To think about a locality is to open up the coming future.