As a boy he says, "I used to tinker about with motorcycles, weapons, all kinds of mechanical objects. My best friend's father ran a boatyard, which fascinated me." With relish Takamatsu tells of a recent poll of newspaper readers who were asked to nominate their favorite architect. He draws a graph showing Japanese architect Tadao Ando's star rising steadily among older readers and his hitting the high spot with twenty-year-olds and gradually declining. The perfect symmetry of the two curves gives him added satisfaction. "He's really a pop star," says the interpreter enthusiastically.

       Yet Takamatsu antagonizes as many people as he impresses. "He's a tiresome, pretentious, stupid man, the very worst kind of architect," exclaimed the critic who was accompanying me. But even he acknowledged that Takamatsu was original.

       What he has created is a vocabulary that is all his own, taken from machinery and engineering. But while most of today's high-tech architects are moving toward Minimalism, creating ever more slender and transparent structures, Takamatsu's buildings are usually as solid and mysterious as Mormon temples. Even their purpose is often hard to divine from outside. Is it an office, a factory or shops?

       A dental clinic near a station in Kyoto looks like a giant steam engine, though Takamatsu insists he had "no such banal associations in mind." For him, machines trigger off a world of fantasy. Machines appeal to him as they did to the painter Fernan Leger, because they suggest action, tension, and compression.

       With this goes a jeweler's concern for intricacy and detail. My first surprise on visiting his buildings was to find they are smaller than I imagined from photographs. What appeared giant and menacing, even extraterrestrial, in real life is almost diminutive. Many Japanese things appeal precisely because they are small and neat. Takamatsu's achievement is to persuade a succession of clients to accept such complexity on quite small buildings.

       Takamatsu's architecture is a complete break with the clean-lined modern box. Strong modeling, interlocking and overlapping motifs, projections, and recesses produce what the eighteenth century called "movement" in architecture. Takamatsu goes a stage further by using elements recalling gantries, cranes, and pistons that suggest parts of the structure are designed to move.