Artist Shinro Ohtake discusses with The Japan Times "inside-out" buildings, private memories, public meanings and other inspirations underlying the "I Love Yu" bathhouse at Naoshima.

The "I Love Yu" public bathhouse is a collaboration with architects' collective graf and is a new building, but it looks old, even a bit like a ruin. What was behind this?

I think there was one basic model. About five years ago, I found a really strange building in front of Takamatsu station [Kagawa Prefecture]. This was in an area slated for redevelopment. There was a really old wooden house, sitting in an open field, built between two concrete walls and with many different tiles on the outside. I couldn't understand it at first, but it turned out that the walls once belonged to the two neighboring buildings on either side. Between these two buildings, somebody had built a wooden Japanese house. And that guy didn't leave. When the two other buildings were taken away, just the walls supporting the house in between were left behind. Those two walls revealed what once was inside those buildings, the tiles and the mirrors.