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TOYO ITO
 
 
 
 
  Name   Toyo Ito (伊東 豊雄)
       
  Born   June 1, 1941
       
  Died    
       
  Nationality   Japan
       
  School    
     
  Official website   www.toyo-ito.co.jp
       
     
 
BIOGRAPHY        
   

At first glance, it is possible to mistake Toyo Ito's work as high-tech or perhaps late modernist. Early on, he was heavily influenced by Metabolism (especially as it was defined by his mentor, Kiyonori Kikutake) and its English correspondent, Archigram, even going so far as to initially name his firm "Urban Robot." However, Ito came to see that celebrating the machine in the latter half of the 20th century represented a position that was fallacious in its nostalgia. The shift in his thinking is marked by White U, a building he designed in 1976 for his recently widowed sister; this project catalyzed Ito to embrace immateriality over form.

Although White U is often treated as an anomaly because it is heavy concrete construction (most of Ito's work strives to be paper-thin), he established goals for the project that remain the basis for much of his designs over the subsequent 25 years. Ito used the building to shape light, both to evoke beauty and to create a constantly changing space, either fluid and continuous or set off by light and shadow. The lack of formal room divisions encouraged free movement, and the flow of both people and energy became the heart of Ito's architecture. Ito also extended this sense of spatial continuity into the central courtyard of White U, foreshadowing later efforts to unify architecture and landscape, as seen at the Shimosuwa Municipal Museum (1992) and the Nagaoka Lyric Hall (1996).

In later work, Ito explores materials such as glass and corrugated aluminum as well as the effects of natural light, most evident in his 1990 T Building. Ito also studied the implications of changing translucency in glass materials, especially in the 1989 Guest House for Sapporo Brewery and in a 1990 proposal for La Maison de la Culture de Japon. Ito extended these investigations to artificial light with the competition entry for the Tower of Winds (1986; Yokohama), where wind speed and direction, sound, and the time of day activate electrical lighting in varying overlapping patterns. More important was the 1991 installation Ito designed for "Visions of Japan." In this space, multiple scenes of everyday life in Tokyo flashed across every surface of a room, creating a filmic effect Ito is only beginning to approach in his built work.

In addition to light, Ito has attempted to embody the flow of other forms of energy in his work. Wind shaped the appearance not only of the Tower of Winds but also his 1984 house for his family, Silver Hut in Tokyo. The flow of economic demand during the volatile "Bubble" period made Ito conscious of the relatively short lifespans of many postwar buildings, and his designs for Nomad Restaurant (1986) and the temporary Noh Theater (1987), intended from the start to be used for only short periods, allowed him to explicitly explore the impermanence of architecture. Ito proved himself a keen observer of actual conditions in a changing society, recognizing that the rapid economic expansion of Japan's postwar period signaled an ephemeral and superficial role for buildings and attempting to discover the relevance of architecture under these new circumstances. It was at this time that Ito deliberately began to position his architecture as antiheroic or nonmonumental, and his interior spaces became increasingly important.

His prescient designs for the "Tokyo Nomad Woman," Pao I (1981) and Pao II (1985), were immediately understood to recognize the new social freedoms young Japanese women enjoyed in the 1980s but also stood as a criticism of the otherwise staid expectations that held true for much of Japanese society. Although it was not recognized until recently, these designs also anticipated the placeless portable networks that have become common at the end of the century. (Perhaps it is not coincidental that the I-mode, a system for receiving and sending e-mail or downloading web pages and other data through a cellular phone, was developed by the wife of another Japanese architect whose work is clearly influenced by Ito.) In response to the emergence of rootless communities, in the 1990 T Building and the 1993 ITM Building, Ito began to concentrate his efforts on creating "communication locations," natural eddies in people's movement through a building that would enhance meeting and exchanging information—thus refuting the dystopian isolation many perceived in the Pao designs.

Ironically, as Ito attempted to create an architecture of the electronic age, he was increasingly driven to readdress the themes of machine-age architecture. More importantly, Ito has been one of Japan's most technologically sophisticated architects, applying the collaborative opportunities in Japan's construction community to introduce new construction materials and develop ambitious structural approaches. His applications of technology, however, differ. In Nagaoka Lyric Hall (1997; Niigata), he erodes the organizing power of structure with an apparently random organization of columns, whereas in projects such as the Ota-ku Resort Complex (1998; Nagano), Ito's structural planes achieve new levels of improbable thinness. In 2000, Ito revived a long-standing interest in aluminum by using it in the delicate structure for a small Tokyo residence, and he has projects on the boards that explore the implications of aluminum as a structural skin.

Ito's competition-winning proposal for "Sendai Mediatheque" (2001; Miyagi-Senadai) is a summation of many of these themes and a landmark in his career. The structure is composed of 13 latticed tubes, intended to frame vertical movement through horizontal layers of the building that are barely divided by extremely thin, beam-free steel floor plates. The tubes encase elevators, stairs, pipes, ducts, and other building systems. Daylight is directed through several tubes by means of a motorized set of vertical louvers, and electrical lighting seeping between floors is made apparent by the use of different colors of high-intensity lighting. To ride the elevators up one tube while other elevators and elevator weights slip soundlessly up and down the adjacent tubes is to understand the sense of fluidity that Ito has long intended in his work.

 

Dana Buntrock

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.

 
 
 
 
 
 
TIMELINE        
    Born 1 June 1941 in Seoul, South Korea, under Japanese occupa- tion, Graduated from Tokyo University, bachelor’s degree 1965; worked for Kiyonori Kikutake Architect and Associates 1965— 69. Established his own office, Urban Robot (URBOT), Tokyo 1971 (office was renamed Toyo Ito and Associates, Architects in 1979). Selected awards include the Architectural Institute of Japan Award for Silver Hut 1986, Togo Murano Award for the Sapporo Brewery Guest House 1990, Mainichi Art Award for Yatsushiro Municipal Museum 1992, Building Constructors’ Society Award for Yatsushiro Municipal Museum 1993, Japa- nese Education Minister’s Art Encouragement Award (for Odate Dome, 1998), and Building Constructors’ Society Award and the Japan Art Academy Prize 1999. Exhibitions dedicated to Ito’s work include “Pao I, Exhibition Project for Pao: A Dwelling for Tokyo Nomad Woman” (Seibu Department Store, 1985), “Architecture in the City of Winds” (Gallery Ma, Tokyo, 1986), “Anemorphosis: Transformations by Wind” (Tokyo, 1986), “Pao II, Exhibition Project for Pao: A Dwelling for Tokyo Nomad Woman” (Brussels, Belgium, 1989), “Toyo Ito, Archi- tecture Fluctuante” (Institut Francais d’ Architecture, Paris, 1991), “Toyo Ito” (Tokyo, 1992), “Blurring Architect (Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen, 1999), and “Al chitec- ture [sic] 2000” proposals for aluminum structural systems (GA Gallery, Tokyo, 2000).

 
 
 
 
 
 
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