The Haruki Murakami Library

The designers renovated Waseda University's existing Building No. 4 into the Haruki Murakami Library, threading a wooden tunnel through it as an architectural expression of the tunnel concept in Murakami's novels, transcending time and space. The white paint on the exterior walls of Building No. 4 was first removed and repainted to neutralize the original building, emphasizing the added three-dimensional timber canopy. The canopy marks the entrance to the tunnel and signals the boundary between scales. The wooden tunnel cuts vertically through the existing floor slabs and simultaneously serves as bookshelves, a theater, and a small lecture hall. In the twentieth century, dominated by concrete buildings characterized as hard and cold, the architects took the opposite approach, using slender, soft timber to build a tunnel that protects and nurtures dreams. The project was completed in April 2021 and provides students and visitors with a literary atmosphere that bridges the university's modernist architecture with the imaginative world of one of Japan's most beloved novelists.