Toyo Ito

Beyond Modernism

Toyo Ito & Associates, Tokyo, Japan

Toyo Ito.

Photography: Matthias Engesser

The quest to find a ‘new real’ in architecture gave Japanese architect Toyo Ito a greater appreciation for the materiality of steel. The modern master’s much-awaited recent Australian visit was punctuated by very few media opportunities, but one of those was with Steel Profile’s Rachael Bernstone, where he talked about his landmark projects.

Toyo Ito experienced an epiphany during the course of his Sendai Mediatheque project in Sendai City, Japan. Completed in 2001, this set him on a new direction in design. Prior to winning the design competition in 1995 for a complex to house a library, art gallery and audio visual centre, Ito had sought to incorporate technology explicitly in his buildings, creating structures that “nobody could touch”, that were “impossible to grasp and hold”.

His Tower of Winds (1986) in Yokohama and Tokyo’s Egg of Winds (1991) were described by Tokyo-based architect Andrew Barrie as “interactive landmarks, whose design seeks to represent the invisible electronic world as a parallel to our physical environment”.

You can read the article here