Toyo Ito was born on June 1, 1941 in Keijo, Korea.

His father was a business man with a special interest in the early ceramic ware of the Yi Dynasty of Korea and Japanese style paintings.

He also was a sports fan of baseball and golf. In 1943, Ito, his mother, and his two elder sisters moved back to Japan.

Two years later, his father returned to Japan as well, and they all lived in his father’s hometown of Shimosuwa-machi in Nagano Prefecture.

His father died in 1953, when he was 12.

After that the rest of family operated a miso (bean paste) making factory.

At present, all but one sister who is three years older than Ito, have died.

Ito established his own architecture office in 1971, and the following year he married. His wife died in 2010.

They had one daughter who is now 40 and is editing Vogue Nippon.

In his youth, Ito admits to not having a great interest in architecture.

There were several early influences however. His grandfather was a lumber dealer, and his father liked to draw plans for his friends’ houses.

When Ito was a freshman in high school, his mother asked the early Modernist architect, Yoshinobu Ashihara, who had just returned to Japan from the U.S. where he worked at Marcel Breuer’s office, to design their home in Tokyo. He was in the third grade of junior high school when he moved to Tokyo and went to Hibiya High School.

At the time, he never dreamed he would become an architect—his passion was baseball. It was while attending the University of Tokyo that architecture became his main interest. For his undergraduate diploma design, he submitted a proposal for the reconstruction of Ueno Park, which won the top prize of the University of Tokyo.

Toyo Ito began working in the firm of Kiyonori Kikutake & Associates after he graduated from Tokyo University’s Department of Architecture in 1965.

By 1971, he was ready to start his own studio in Tokyo, and named it Urban Robot (Urbot).

In 1979, he changed the name to Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects.In delivering the Kenneth Kassler lecture at Princeton University in 2009, Ito explained his general thoughts on architecture:

“The natural world is extremely complicated and variable, and its systems are fluid – it is built on a fluid world. In contrast to this, architecture has always tried to establish a more stable system. To be very simplistic, one could say that the system of the grid was established in the twentieth century. This system became popular throughout the world, as it allowed a huge amount of architecture to be built in a short period of time.”

However, it also made the world’s cities homogenous. One might even say that it made the people living and working there homogenous too. In response to that, over the last ten years, by modifying the grid slightly I have been attempting to find a way of creating relationships that bring buildings closer to their surroundings and environment.” Ito amends that last thought to “their natural environment.”

After designing critically-acclaimed buildings like Sendai Mediatheque, Ito became an architect of international importance during the early-2000s leading to projects throughout Asia, Europe, North America and South America. Ito designed the Main Stadium for the 2009 World Games in Kaohsiung and the under-construction Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, both in Taiwan.

In Europe, Ito and his firm renovated the façade of the Suites Avenue Apartments with striking stainless steel waves and, in 2002, designed the celebrated temporary Serpentine Pavilion Gallery in London’s Hyde Park.

Other projects during this time include the White O residence in Marbella, Chile and the never-built University of California, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive in California.

TOYO ITO’S PROJECTS

Yatsushiro Municipal Museum, 1991

The city of Yatsushiro is known in Japan as a home for exemplary architecture – the legacy at least in part of Artpolis, a plan by the government of the Kumamoto Prefecture to seek out a range of talented architects to design cultural buildings in the cities of the region. Though the Artpolis scheme has been running for the past 22 years, perhaps its most successful building was completed back in 1991, with the construction of Toyo Ito’s Yatsushiro Municipal Museum.

The selection of Toyo Ito for this particular project was seen as particularly risky, considering his commitment to contemporary and often technological design, as the site is directly opposite the historic Shohinken Villa and near to the ruins of Yatsushiro Castle. However, Ito did not shy away from his progressive convictions, designing a sleek glass pavilion with a complex, billowing steel canopy.

Though the museum contains two floors, the earth around the building was raised into a mound to give the appearance of a single story structure sat atop a small hill. Above the undulating roof is a horizontal half-cylinder, which provides storage for museum pieces. The logic for this move was that the high water-table on the site would make the common practice of placing storage in a basement too much of a risk.Fellow Japanese architect Kengo Kuma praised the museum, saying that it was “not only a critique of the ‘heavy and strong’ Western model of architecture, but also of these simplistic ‘traditional Japanese’ buildings, which are far removed from the true spirit of Japanese tradition.”

Odate Dome, 1997

The Odate Dome in the Akita Prefecture of Japan was completed by Toyo Ito in June 1997. The project is another example of the architect’s impressive canon, making use of cutting edge technology and bringing architecture closer to people. Seemingly floating a few meters above the ground, the dome leaves space for the people to flow in comfortably, while the use of wood is itself a way of bringing nature into architecture while adopting the latest technological advancements.

The dome boasts a lavish height of 52 meters running 178 meters along the major axis and 157 meters along the minor axis. It is built of a combination of steel and wood, its ground floor left uncovered to reveal the columns that carry the dome and create a sense of transparency between the interior and the surrounding. Even the glass facade on the ground floor is pushed inside so that the dome appears to hover above the space it shelters.

Aita Japanese cedar wood was used, which is grown in the region and was transported in modern efficient methods. The 25,000 laminated wood planks are glued together and harvested and processed in an efficient manner for the construction of the dome. The focus of the interior is on the space created by this sheltering dome, in which the wood plays a crucial role, the comfort and warmth it brings along beautifully embracing by the space.

Clearly, the dome is interpreted by Toyo Ito not as a structure to merely host an event, but rather as a space tailored to welcome large amounts of people and assure them comfort and pleasure. The building hosts sports games including baseball and soccer, but also various events and performances. It receives a reasonable amount of natural light, ventilates in summer and averts monsoon winds in winter, and most importantly speaks to its surrounding through a transparent ground floor level that subtly but reassuringly carries the structure above it.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2002

Toyo Ito, recipient of the Pritzker Prize 2013, along with Cecil Balmond and Arup were in charge of the design of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion back in 2002. What appeared to be an extremely complex random pattern was in fact derived from an algorithm of  gba cube that expanded as it rotated. The intersecting lines formed different triangles and trapezoids, whose transparency and translucency gave a sense of infinitely repeated motion.

The Tower Of Winds, 2002 

The Tower of Winds is a project largely indicative of Toyo Ito’s approach to architecture, particularly his belief in the importance of technology and its vital role in the future of architecture. The project not only embraces technology and involves it in a dialogue with the city, but also establishes a direct symbolic relationship between nature and the installation.

By day the tower, clad in perforated aluminum panels, reflects the city through the reflective surfaces covering the steel core. The project is rather humble, literally reflecting the city through the complexity of its material. Come night time, the Tower of Winds takes a more pro-active role, translating sound and wind into light through two computers sensing the varying wind and noise levels and accordingly powering 1300 lamps, 12 neon rings, and 30 flood lights at its base.

The tower is constantly transforming, its small lamps changing colors according the surrounding sounds and its neon rings rippling according to the winds of the city. As a result there is no pattern since the display of light is a direct representation of the environment, portrayed on a 21 meter high cylindrical surface.

The project sits as a technological sculpture, welcoming travelers arriving at the rail way station of Yokohama, and oddly enough housing water tanks serving air conditioning machinery for an underground mall that it sits atop. Toyo Ito creates an infinite relationship between technology, architecture, the city, and its inhabitants emphasizing the profound impact of the city on the human race and the crucial role of technology in architecture.

Toyo Ito was awarded the 1987 Edwin Guth Memorial Award of Excellence from America’s Illumination Engineering Society for this project, which is credited for its tribute to cosmopolitanism. Ito was awarded the project upon winning a competition in which his success is attributed to the ability to convert a purely technical structure into an iconic landmark for the city.

Matsumoto Performing Arts Centre, 2004

Nestling in a densely inhabited neighbourhood of the city of Matsumoto, the Japanese architect’s newly inaugurated Performing Arts Centre boldly rearranges traditional circulation patterns to meet the restrictions of an exceptionally narrow site. The result is a sinuous, embryonic form that delicately interacts with its surroundings.

Matsumoto Performing Arts Centre stands on the site of the old Civic Culture Hall in the heart of the city, some fifteen minutes from Matsumoto Station. The main façade overlooks a residential area; the adjacent Shinto shrine adds a note of greenery to the site. Ito’s competition proposal responded to the stringent environmental conditions almost magically through the spatial composition on plan.

By situating the fly-tower in the middle of the building and reversing the stage and the audience seating, deliveries can be handled more efficiently while significantly reducing the volume of truck noise for the surrounding community.

Likewise, the curvature of the building’s exterior wall is skirted by the seating of the Grand Hall with its horseshoe-shaped balconies and enclosing ring of dressing rooms. That said, the basic skeleton of the plan consists in its entry-stair-foyer flow, a baroque spatial scheme that serves to heighten the “drama of entrance” in adrenaline-coursing curves. The Ito proposal has the audience enter to the left and proceed around the back of the space.

Better to picture the plan as an embryo in the womb. (Such a shape is even used in the Centre’s logo3. In Japan, opera house spaces – our National Theatres included – are also required to function virtually simultaneously as music halls and small theatres.

The Matsumoto Performing Arts Centre has a traditional European-scale opera hall space with four tiers of balconies, though a unique lowering feature in the ceiling helps “contract” the space so as to accommodate smaller productions both in terms of acoustics and audience capacity. Moreover, the “four-square stage” plan allows the back of the stage to be transformed into an Experimental Theatre, complete with folding banked seating. It is doubtful that those entering from the so-called “Theatre Park” lobby will even realise that they are backstage at the opera.

The embryo-shaped space that connects and envelops both theatres is also a flat slab-built “tabula rasa” raised on slender round columns. In marked contrast to such intense spaces are the Grand and Small Halls with their perfect acoustics, consummate lighting and air conditioning, this space completely lacks architectural metaphors or programmes.

It is designed to let viewers, actors, performers and directors alike float in an undefined environment – although it conceals the possibility of some creative production suddenly turning the place into a theatre space for a single night. Ito has said, “I want to create flat spaces free of hierarchies.”

Municipal Funeral Hall, 2006

“The roof of the “Meiso no mori” (forest of meditation) crematorium seems to float above the ground with a quality of lightness not necessarily associated with reinforced concrete. Built in the park-like cemetery at Kakamigahara, a town of 150,000 inhabitants in the prefecture of Gifu, the building nestles between wooded hills on the south and a small artificial lake on the north side. As the old crematorium on this site was to be demolished, Toyo Ito was free to realise his idea of a funeral hall not constrained by religious content. Ito wanted to create a place for quiet reflection, a space whose organic language of forms would suggest a closeness to nature. The 20 cm thin roof, made up of concave and convex forms, flows into twelve tapered columns; its weight is also borne on the two-storey core.”

Tama Art University Library, 2007

This is a library for an art university located in the suburbs of Tokyo. Passing through the main entrance gate, the site lies behind a front garden with small and large trees, and stretches up a gentle slope.

The existing cafeteria was the sole place in the university shared by both students and staff members across all disciplines, so the first impetus for the design was to question how an institution as specialised as a library could provide an open commonality for all.

The first idea was for a wide open gallery on the ground level that would serve as an active thoroughfare for people crossing the campus, even without intending to go to the library.To let the flows and views of these people freely penetrate the building, the structure of randomly placed arches would create the sensation as if the sloping floor and the front garden’s scenery were continuing within the building.

The characteristic arches are made out of steel plates covered with concrete. In plan these arches are arranged along curved lines which cross at several points. The arches are extremely slender at the bottom and still support the heavy live loads of the floor above. The spans of the arches vary from 1.8 to 16 metres, but the width is kept uniformly at 200mm.

The intersections of the rows of arches help to articulate softly separated zones within this one space. Shelves and study desks of various shapes, glass partitions that function as bulletin boards, etc., give these zones a sense of both individual character and visual as well as spatial continuity.

On the sloped ground level, a movie-browser like a bar counter and a large glass table for the latest issues of magazines invite students to spend their time waiting for the bus in the library.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor, one finds large art books on low bookshelves crossing under the arches. Between these shelves are study desks of various sizes. A large table with a state-of-art copy machine allows users to do professional editing work.

The spatial diversity one experiences when walking through the arches different in span and height changes seamlessly from a cloister-like space filled with natural light, to the impression of a tunnel that cannot be penetrated visually.

The new library is a place where everyone can discover their style of “interacting” with books and film media as if they were walking through a forest or in a cave; a new place of arcade-like spaces where soft mutual relations form by simply passing through; a focal centre where a new sense of creativity begins to spread throughout the art university’s campus.

Architecture Museum 2011

The recently-opened Toyo Ito Architecture Museum on Omishima, a small island that dots Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, is comprised of two structures: the Steel Hut, a trapezoidal configuration of black steel that rises from a hillcrest overlooking the ocean, and the nearby Silver Hut, a humble vaulted pavilion that recalls the elegance of the lightwight and prefabricated structures of Japan and Europe’s post-war period. The formal language of the Steel Hut, which has its roots in the geometric cosmology of Buckminster Fuller’s space frames and dymaxion maps, Louis Kahn’s City Tower proposal, Moshe Safdie’s post-collegiate megastructural projects, not to mention Ito’s own early work, rebukes the flowing abstract fields that characterize the current Japanese architectural scene.

That isn’t to say that Ito’s museum is out of place in Japan’s architectural culture–it’s decidely Japanese, with its polyhedral massing channeling the country’s technofuturist eccentricities, its illustrious Metabolist past, and even, its former shipbuilding dominance. Ito himself described the museum as a “sea-worthy vessel.  Like a ship embarking from the port city of Imabari with a cargo of dreams of architecture for the future, the museum is setting sail on a new voyage into the unknown.”

The museum is a poignant affirmation of Ito’s celebrated career. His most famous buildings, including the perforated Mikimoto Ginza tower and the fluid-like Taichung Opera House, now under construction, are all present–represented in miniature and in other forms–collected together in the architectural equivalent of a warm embrace.

Venice Biennale 2012: Architecture. Possible here? Home-for-all / Japan Pavilion

The Japan Pavilion for the Venice Biennale (designed by Takamasa Yoshizaka in 1956) presented the exhibit “Architecture. Possible here? Home-for-all”, curated by Toyo Ito, with the participation of architectural photographer Naoya Hatakeyama, and architects Kumiko Inui, Sou Fujimoto and Akihisa Hirata.

The exhibition, which was awarded with the Gold Lion at the Biennale, takes us through the process where these three emerging architects collaborated with Toyo Ito to design the “Home-for-all”, a project for the inhabitants of Rikuzentakata who lost their homes during the tsunami in 2011.

In the walls we find Hatakeyama’s photos from before and after the tsunami, along with a visual registry of the architects visiting the location. Around the pavilion, several study models reveal the process to design this unique type of house.

The jury stated at the award ceremony that ”the presentation and the storytelling in the Pavilion are exceptional and highly accessible to a broad audience. The jury was impressed with the humanity of this project.”

Immediately post-quake Ito proposed a project known as Home-for-All: an attempt to provide places where those who’ve lost their homes in the tsunami can enjoy a little breathing space – a place to meet, talk, eat and drink together.

Those living in the temporary housing erected in the disaster zone may at least have secured a minimum of privacy, but having lost their former communities, are compelled to live an isolated existence. Dwellings are small and thus unsociable.

Even just to talk to the next-door neighbors requires standing outside on a bare gravel road. It struck me that we could supply small wooden buildings, places for people to gather, in a corner of these temporary housing sites, and I launched a campaign to do so. Soliciting funds from companies and organizations around the world, the idea is also to have manufacturers supply the materials free of charge.

One characteristic of Home-for-All is the way in which those “making” the facilities and those “living” in them join together to discuss the project during the design and building process. Listening to the wishes of people living in temporary housing, sympathetic students and designers, tradesmen involved in the construction work, and residents cooperate to make them reality. Admittedly small in scale, the greatest significance of the Home-for-All project lies in its realization through this meeting of minds and hearts.

As Ito says in Toyo Ito – Forces of Nature published by Princeton Architectural Press:

“The relief centers offer no privacy and scarcely enough room to stretch out and sleep, while the hastily tacked up temporary housing units are little more than rows of empty shells: grim living conditions either way. Yet even under such conditions, people try to smile and make do…. They gather to share and communicate in extreme circumstances – a moving vision of community at its most basic. Likewise, what we see here are very origins of architecture, the minimal shaping of communal spaces.”

Recently, Ito has also thought of his legacy, as apparent by the museum of architecture that bears his name on the small island of Omishima in the Seto Inland Sea. Also designed by Ito, the museum opened in 2011 and showcases his past projects as well as serving as a workshop for young architects. Two buildings comprise the complex, the main building “Steel Hut” and the nearby “Silver Hut,” which is a recreation of the architect’s former home in Tokyo, built in 1984.

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