At the time I designed this building, I had a fascination for de Chirico’s paintings, which usually portray barren, dreamlike cityscapes. The multi-story houses which appear in his work are more like a collection of boxes than places for people to live. De Chirico’s blunt statements on architecture appealed to my esthetic taste – but they were against my concern to energize the environment with activities attributable to life.

The plan was to make four box-like structures on the four corners of a walled garden whose lush vegetation would contrast with the boxes.

In order to separate interior life from the outer tissue, I made a two-layered facade freeing the external elevation from windows which, I always thought, violate the purity of brickwall facades. Soon after starting construction of the first box (unit) we had to start construction of others, given the rapid growth of the university.