[Monument issue 90]

Toyo Ito : influential Japanese architect , Toyo Ito about natural beauty, longevity and golf

Toyo ito is one of the most influential architects of our age but he describes himself as a young architect. He keeps his mind young and flexible by communicating with everyone (staffs), having no hierarchy between him and the staff.  He talks in suggestions from everybody including engineers and all the staff. He takes it all in and work from there as he believes that everyone can come and contribute something. From his attitude of working together with co workers, I have learnt that every single comments must be taken into the work and that I should value everyones comments about our design especially sean and Jisun who are working with me. Everything starts as really vague and undefined but e is more interested in the process of creation, excited about how design might happen. The idea goes to a different place and changes and then the whole process happens again and again, allowing the design to keep on moving.

He is more interested in the effect or the physical response that the material might produce. Asking himself, ‘what is the substance of the material.’ His response to the insubstantial digital age is finding  a bodily abstraction that is more about the whole human body rather than just about vision. He wants his architecture to be primitive, something where human beings have a direct relationship with the work.  Nowadays, people tend to photograph buildings before people and furniture but he believes that photographs should take natural view of the buildings. He believes that the architecture should be in the way that people move around and experience the space and that is what must somehow be captured by photographs. He believes that the city and nature are not really two different things, but rather be one thing, working as one. The city and nature should be mixed up together so it becomes very difficult to even distinguish them so he takes different side to this quote said by a famous writer, ‘while nature is beautiful, in fact, the city is the most beautiful thing in existence.’

The relationship between a building’s materials and human activity

Eg. Steel: he doesn’t want it to have an artificial quality so he rather gives it a feeling of warmth.

Sendai mediathesque

Sendai mediatheque is a center for activities in the fields of art and film, serving as a public facility to help people freely exchange information with each other through various media and learn how to use that information.

At the beginning, plans called for a multifunctional facility comprised of a library, gallery, visual media center that also contained services to aid the sight-and hearing-impaired.subsequently, plans changed so that instead of simply being a “mixed-use” facility, it was intended to encompass a larger sphere of functions that would allow the facility to operate as a unified “mediatheque” with common goals to respond to a continuously changing information environment and users’ diverse needs.the “sendai mediatheque will gather, preserve, exhibit, and present various forms of media without being bound to form or type. this public facility for the 21st century will, through various functions and services, be able to support the cultural and educational activities of its users.

 

The Mediatheque is located on a tree-lined avenue in Sendai, its transparent facade allowing for the revelation of diverse activities that occur within the building. Along this main facade the six 15.75-inch-thin floor slabs seem to be floating within the space connected only by the 13 vertical tube steel lattice columns that rise up from ground floor to roof, similar to the trunks of trees of a forest. The tubes are both structure and vector for light and all of the utilities, networks and systems that allow for technological communication and vertical mobility, including elevators and stairs. Each vertical shaft varies in diameter and is independent of the facade, allowing for a free form plan which varies from floor to floor.