Expanding Notions of Space, Movement and Light
By D.H. Chung

For Toyo Ito, the modern man exists in two planes – one, the body in which he lives and the other, the virtual body in which his senses, stimulated by modern technology, exist. Contemporary architecture, according to Ito, must expand its notions of space and movement to incorporate this second realm of existence. What this translates into is use of state of the art technologies, fluid spaces, buildings that change color by day and by night – in other words, a feast of sensory and physical stimuli, all with down-to-earth practical uses that one almost forgets to appreciate. In Tokyo, Ito is synonymous with the kind of futuristic urban landscapes that the city prides itself on pioneering. For the rest of the world, he is a constant source of revolutionary ideas who has made architecture as much about “soft” spaces as “hard” spaces.

"Each of us today possesses two bodies: the primitive body that a human being has always possessed and the virtual body that has come into being with the spread of the media."

	Essay by Toyo Ito
	Toyo Ito's Buildings

After graduating from Tokyo University’s department of architecture in 1965, Ito started his own studio, ‘urban robot’ (urbot) in 1971. The firm was renamed to Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects in 1979 and exists under that name to this day. Over the years, his firm has completed groundbreaking projects in a wide variety of building types and sizes. Ito's mature vocabulary seamlessly fuses futuristically minimalist structures with a sophisticated use of technology. At his best, his projects become a dynamic, almost organic patch of the dense urban fabric of the modern city. In particular, two buildings, Sendai Mediatheque and Tower of Winds, epitomize Ito's ideological leanings as well as his superior skills as an engineer and architect.

"In some way, architecture is part of the conservative forces in a society because it follows the rules set down by tradition. So architecture always lags behind the development of advanced ideas. How to pull architecture up and keep it abreast of avant-garde concepts, how to break out of old modes of thinking and escape the confinement of old schools of thought. This is the challenge faced by architects."

Sendai Mediatheque
The media and cultural center in Sendai, Japan is one of the best examples of Ito’s late work. The building is a multi-purpose cultural center for the city of Sendai, housing a library, art gallery, an audio-visual library, a film studio and a café. The civic nature of the space as well as the multiple needs of the project challenged designers to define a new typology for the building. Ito won the project in a competition in 1994 among 235 competing proposals.

"What I am trying to do is to blur the discipline of architecture by having two different kinds of architecture take place concurrently; one revealing its material nature thoroughly, and the other creating a space made purely from symbols."

Ito stated that he was originally inspired by the image of seaweed gently swaying in water for the project. Like floating seaweed, thirteen lattice-like tubes of constantly varying diameter penetrate the seven floors of the building. These tubular structures carry crucial network and communications wires necessary for the media services the center provides. They also carry the weight of the fifteen inch thin floor slabs, which gives the building the impression of being suspended in mid-air. At night, these structural tubes glow with light, giving the entire building a luminous hue. The skin of the building is transparent and light, and floods the interior with sunlight during the day and the glow from the tubes at night. From the beginning, Ito tried to stay close to his original concept for the center : a building that stood on three ideas - a transculent skin, tubular structures, and floor plates. The key lies of course, in the tubes, that simultaneously give life to the digital ecology of the space and to the physical viability of the building.

Tower of Winds
Another of Ito’s widely celebrated projects is his Tower of Winds, built in 1986 near the central railway station in Yokohama, Japan. The tall cylinder shaped tower with perforated aluminium panels functions as a ventilation and water tank facility for an underground shopping center. In the daylight, the Tower looks like a giant grey sculpture suspended in the sky. But it is really at night that the tango between functionality and aesthetics takes place. The entire cylinder lights up from within, turning it into a luminous platonic volume, reflecting the ever changing "winds" of Tokyo.

The dancing lights are computer-programmed to generate different patterns based on information collected from the surroundings. The tower, covered in acrylic mirrors with over a thousand mini lamps and twelve neon rings, also has thirty floodlights at the base. The mini lamps change in color in reaction to the noise around the Tower, the neon lights ripple up and down and the aluminum panels on the tower appear and disappear with the wind. At once a wonderful metaphor for the cosmopolitan, volatile Tokyo, and a tribute to the amazing marriage of technology and creativity, the Tower is truly breathtaking to watch.

Today, Toyo Ito is one of the most influential architects in the world. His minimalist structures have fused hi-tech media with the basic elements of nature such as light, wind and sound, creating a new way to understand, employ and appreciate architecture. In his "Blurring Architecture" exhibition, Ito explained that he wanted to blur the hard lines between physical buildings and abstract symbols. Technology, he believes, will provide architects this bridge.

"It will not take so much time to make all the world connected together by the computer system. I consider that the combination of primitive nature space and electronic technology will make the tomorrow utopia. The theme of contemporary architecture would be the way how you will describe it in architecture."