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How I got into the obsession with historical architecture

I hated old buildings.
When I was a little, my parents loved to travle all over Japan with me and my sister.
We were not rich famiy to stay in a ruxuary hotel, so motel was our usual choice, or we even stayed in the car. Which I didn’t mind at all, but I hated to stay in old hotels, where you would easily have fantasy to bump into gohost or something unreal objects.

The creepy pictures in room, the ceiling that looks almost falling off with molds, squeak sounds when we walk on the corridor……
Those things remind me the scareness of old buildings.
I still hate “old” hotels or “old” buildings.

Yes,they are indeed beautiful !
Like ordinary young girl at the point, I valued more new architectures over old ones.
Because they are so clean, cool, awesome and convenient (elevators, AC, automatical doors…).

However, when I moved to the States ten years ago, I found that the people in the city are so admired to old architecture. They of course have new buildings and luxuary apartments as well, but they seem to be proud to choose old ones with good maintenances.

And they even live in or work in those buildings with endlessly maintenances.
This surprised me a lot, and I started looking at those old buildings with different perspectives.

It is indeed builtiful to look at those old architectures.

And the biggest thing that admire me was that those old buildings have stories that inherited from generation to generation.

Stories behind historical architectures

 When you find those buildings, you would notice that they have already stories built on time era.

In Japan, simce we had a war on our land, there few old/historical architectures, compareing to other countries, but there are some!
(Don’t get me wrong, I am not accusing anything here for the war)

Like, Kumamoto castle in Kyushu island,

this castle was originaly built in the later 1480’s, and abounded by fire in the 1870’s.
The current Kumamoto castle is not the original one, but rebuilt in 1960’s.

I can see that you may be thinking “that is not that old architecture”.
Yes, you are right, this is not that OLD architecture.

But it has a story with history.
Which is that Kiyomasa Kato built this castle with his enormous leadership with the citizens in Kumamoto at the time. And this castle was actually eatable!
This is because Kiyomasa thought ahead for any battle thagt might be happening in the future. When it comes to battle, there were possibilites that they would besieging with not knowing the end timing. He made the castle with dried bracken (Warabi) so that just in case they are out of foods, they could take those brackens out and cook them.

And I believe and love in those history stories.

This is where & what about old architectures I am into,and I will be covering with this blog!
It is the HISTORICAL architecture.