Observe a building with stacks of apartment windows and people going about their activities, oblivious to other lives near them; these people live in their worlds, unaware of different apartments; they are like whole universes, although small. Moving from the living room is an entrance to the natural world where rain, storm, sun, day, night, and oceans, everything that is seen in the world. One person can live their entire life in the apartment, the living room turns from the comfort of furniture to that of the world of nature with one thought or a button pushed, and the apartment becomes a rainforest, a desert, or a rainy day in the city. In the middle of the high-rise building, a central tree reaches all apartments, residents climb the trees, or the tree is like an elevator, or there are winding stairs.

Each apartment seen has a life of its own; the people who live there are nameless people from a distance; in a way, this is the way of people who walk the streets; they are oblivious to one another in metaphor; this is what the apartment represents.

Infinite hallways exist between the apartments, but people can other apartment walks to other apartments. Depending on the apartment the hallway might suddenly form into a rainforest, desert, or beach; to get from one apartment to another could require a long or short journey. The visitor or traveler to one apartment will see a door hidden among tangled foliage when entering another world; the apartment is a sunlit beach, a night scene, a rainy day, under a canopy sheltered from the elements; there could be two people talking with one another. In time isolation is broken. Others discover that unique apartment; eventually, it becomes filled with tourists from other apartments.

The tree of the high rise woke up its branches, its compassion for all the apartments imparting life to all the apartment dwellers.

Robert J. Matsunaga