For more than six years, Takahiko Nakayama has been cleaning windows on thousands of buildings in Tokyo. With every climb his fascination with architecture grew until he finally decided that he was ready to do more than just wipe the facades: He wanted to design them himself. Nakayama, 28, is now enrolled in an architecture and interior-design evening course at Aoyama Technical College. His view on well-designed buildings is simple — use clean lines and less height in order to save energy. And his view on life? We need more laughter — oh, and plenty of good soba..
Humans can get used to anything. The first time I put a rope around my waist and threw myself over the seventh floor of a building, I thought I would die. I was so scared that I just wanted to make it to the ground floor and quit immediately. But once I was down, it all looked pretty fun.
You can't judge anyone by their looks. Clean-cut people often have pretty dirty private lives. I clean not only outside windows but also inside ones, so I sometimes enter people's apartments. In such cases I get a name list of the occupants beforehand — in one building where the rent is about 3 million yen per unit, two neighboring apartments were owned by the same company. The president was living in one place with his wife and children, and his young lover was in the other!