How do we build something for the future? Whose future? What future? What is the future? And who is this "we" that will build something for this future that is so slippery to know? While we're at it: to build? Must all buildings be built for them to be buildings? What about dreams? Political movements? Personal relationships? Are they buildings too? And what about the unbuilt and the not-built? The act of unbuilding and not-building? In this seminar we will explore these creeping questions and examine how the future is imagined and materialized in architectural theory and practice throughout Japanese history. From the Ise Shrine of the seventh century to modernist experiments of the Metabolist movement, from contemporary works by Isozaki Arata, Atelier Bow Wow, and Kuma Kengo's new Olympic Stadium to our own crazy experiments, we will study built, unbuilt, and non-built structures as theories of the future…and significant acts of the present.