Interview: Architect Koichi Takada

Architect Koichi Takada has never taken the easy option.

Born in Tokyo, at 16 he held dreams of pursuing life as a fashion designer or an artist – aimed at realising a firm desire to live in Manhattan.

He eventually came to architecture – a combination of art and engineering – as a pathway to appease such wants and those of his parents.

It didn’t quite work out – his father offering an easy life and generous role in the family engineering business so long as he remained in Tokyo.

Takada instead chose New York.

Cut to now and the 48-year-old is a force within global architecture, having set up an eponymous Australian-based firm while securing various awards across projects that have transformed urban landscapes here as well as in Asia, America, the Middle East and beyond.

Kanebridge News: Most people would take the path of least resistance – why were you so set on going it alone and moving to New York?

KT: This was definitely a leap of faith. I had this gut feeling that I’m going to survive there, that somehow everything would work out including communications [a language barrier] and making friends – you know Japanese people are very homogenous and very singular, and I’d thrown myself into this melting pot. But it had been a dream of mine.

KN: Did first impressions of the city stack up?

KT: When I arrived my first impression was just disbelief – and the way you come out of the Lincoln Tunnel, I was just,‘wow’. But it was overwhelming, it was noisy and very competitive and cold and I didn’t get the pampering I had with my parents in Japan. I had sold everything to be there and I got sick of it.

RR: You eventually left New York to study in London, how did those times influence you and your work?

KN: After leaving New York, to continue my studies at the AA [Architectural Association School of Architecture] I met and learned from the likes of Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhas, and that’s where I really learnt to push the boundaries, and create the point of difference, the uniqueness within this monotonous repetition of all this regulation … And the cultural component is definitely an important part too. When I was in New York, my favourite part was going to Central Park. And the same in London – I craved breathing space. I discovered a feeling that I connected with when in Japan, because nature is respected and there’s an effort to try and blend in [with nature] and find harmony.

Infinity Tower In Sydney’s Waterloo – Designed by Koichi Takada

KN: Nature is a central part of much of your work.

KT: Yeah. With Infinity [Sydney’s Infinity Tower], when we were competing for the project we were given the volumes, but I thought it would actually overshadow the courtyard which was meant for public use. I thought to myself, ‘why would you create a courtyard that doesn’t receive any daylight?’ So, we opened a hole to let the light in. It’s very simple, but then all of a sudden you have a breeze, light and a way to interact with nature.

KN: Why did you settle in Sydney?

KT: When I moved to Sydney in 1997, I just instantly felt something wonderful about the city, and now I’ve been here more than 20 years. I call it my home. It’s city and nature trying to balance. It’s one of the best cities in the world.

KN: Do you feel your style of melding nature and urban living was a natural fit for Sydney?

KT: Yeah, I think our product is very Sydney, it’s definitely not New York. Definitely not London. Definitely not Tokyo. But also fits what we want to make Sydney – the greenest [plant-filled] city in the world.

KN: The ‘greening’ of cities by architects and urban planners is imperative as we move forward.

KT: For the next generation of architects, they’re very much part of this and have massive challenges to bring awareness to climate change – though it’s also very a globalised challenge for everyone.

KN: Well before Infinity Tower you were designing restaurants in Sydney’s suburbs – and then you went from, say, Sushi Train Maroubra, to Qatar’s Natural Museum. How much pressure came with such a high-profile role?

KT: Well, it was the best project in the world. And yeah, I did feel extra pressure. I think as an architect when you get a sense of freedom and liberation it turns into confidence, but in this instance, you are against all the greats, like Jean Nouvel, and I thought look who we are against, I’m no one.

Interiors of the National Museum of Qatar

KN: You’re quite the sartorial gent – fair to say fashion is a firm creative outlet away from architecture?

KT: Yes, definitely, and I remember seeing Alexander Wang, who I’ve come to admire. You know we went to a grand opening party for Qatar and what I noticed is that I, naively followed the dress code, and these guys just did their own thing. It’s much more interesting than architecture.

KN: Seeing such appealed to the rule-breaker within?

KT: I wish I had figured it out when I was 18 in New York, and I’m not saying break every rule, but growing up in Japan, everything is telling you to conform. But it’s ok to think outside the box, to push a little bit. But it’s not so much his [Wang’s] work, it’s his spirit I’m inspired by. I know what it’s like being Asian in Manhattan, let’s just call it racist, or political, or whatever, but to be in that position and with that creativity and to prevail – I suddenly looked up to him.

koichitakada.com

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

Interview: Architect Koichi Takada

“We want to make Sydney the greenest city in the world.”

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.