Anish Kapoor, Marsyas,
Tate Modern 2002,
photo John Riddy, London /
©Tate from Anish Kapoor
Marsyas Tate Publishing 2002

Once upon a time, a sales message ` the bigger the better` was going around. It was about chocolate. The bigger food would be fascinating, if the price and amount are the same. Then I thought it would be the case in architecture when I saw the Sears tower in Chicago during my studying in UCLA. 110 stories and 443 meters high. It was too high to recognize how high it was. I came to know that there is something which attracts human beings in the unknown fact of the altitude of the architecture. I thought that if I had seen the pyramid I would have felt the same thing. Pyramid is about 150 meters high, and the towers of Gothic cathedrals were almost the same height. It seems to be that the limit of the height of the man-made construction had been about 150 meters till modernism era. But modernism culture got rid of that limit. People suddenly got abele to make the huge constructions, and have been overwhelmed by them. Then I came to know that this `bigness` was led to be one elements of the aesthetic things as `sublimity` by Immanuel Kant.

The smallness should charm us in the same way that the bigness attracts us. People are attracted by tea rooms and lofts not only because they are comfortable but also they have microcosmos. And `kawaii` Japanese concept that has already been the English even French seems to have the mental meaning of admiration of smallness.

Thus bigness and smallness are the important characteristics of architecture. And It must be the significant theme of the architecture how they affect the human mind.