Krešimir Rogina

Japan is the promised land for all architects, including me. I knew that even before I dreamed of becoming an architect. I had some relatives there and I dreamed of visiting them – all alone. My parents wouldn’t even dream of it. But it remained a dream. And I devoured the Japanese sci-fi movies that were fortunately shown in our movie theatres. One of them (Godzilla vs. Megalon, 1973) had two stars: the boy named Rokuro and a house, an abstract cube on a hill with a tree growing through it. It still stands today, it’s close to the college where I was teaching, but I never visited it. Today I know that it’s the Blue Box House designed by the architect Mayumi Miyawaki in Setagaya, built in 1971 for the photographer Osama Hayasaki, whose photo adorned the poster for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. It is possible that it had planted that crucial seed which told me that I should be the creator of such and such, certainly new, world. I’m not sure how I got the idea of Expo 1970 in Osaka, perhaps through the media, but I always felt as if I had been there. Twenty years later, as I first stepped onto the soil of what was then still another planet, my dream came true. And there was no disappointment of achieving a dream, rather it was love at first step. My arrival was all the more magnificent because I came to present my award-winning work for the Central Glass company and, along with Vinko Penezić, was the only one not from the island and was thus treated divinely. For an architect there is a god, the creator of other, new worlds. I won awards in the international contests organized by the journal Shinkenchiku seven times and finally built a house there, which is something that even the world’s more famous faces cannot boast about. This took me to the quake-prone, consecrated ground about twenty times, the last time shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, so I would say that the accumulated longing is mutual!
Penezić&Rogina designed the Japan-Croatia Friendship House which was built in Tokamachi, a town in the wooded hills of Niigata. Back in 2002, the Croatian football team had its camp there during the World Cup in Japan and South Korea and our players were a total attraction for the residents – the house is a memorial to that.