Toyo Ito

The works of Toyo Ito (who was born in 1941 and has been pursuing an independent career as an architect since 1971) elude the grasp of critics owing to their paradoxical character. Underlying everything the Japanese architect has built or designed is an attempt to set architecture free from gravity and a denunciation of the conflicts that accompany the coexistence of form and weight. It is this opposition that lies behind the insistent research Ito has carried out into construction materials, commencing, at the very least, with the aluminium house at Fujisawa-shi, Kanagawa, of 1970-71 although he has gone back to the use of this material with the house at Sakurajosui, Tokyo, 1997-2000).

Over the thirty years that have passed since this first exploration of the potential of non-traditional construction materials (although it is worth recalling that this is a road that has been attempted several times over the course of the twentieth century), Ito's research has developed to the point of making it explicit that the goal he is pursuing is that of a radical stripping away of all the characteristics that architecture has drawn from the tradition from which he himself started out.

Since the works of the seventies, in fact, Ito's language has grown progressively rarefied. While the linguistic apparatus has been reduced to a simple but far from ingenuous declaration of the visual and tactile values of the materials employed without any perceptible comment, the structure of his constructions has tended to lose importance and significance, to the point where many of his works can be seen as a succession of variations on the theme of facing. Although this can be discerned as far back as the decade 1970-80, such variations are a still more evident characteristic of his more recent works, as this book demonstrates.

In the complex of the agricultural park in Oita (1995-2001), for example, the roof made out of different materials is a geometric mask, while even the scheme for the reconfiguration of the Thessaloniki waterfront (1997) prefigures a sort of facing for the city's entire esplanade. Following this line of research, the layouts of his projects have assumed sinuous and insinuating configurations, while the coverings tend to favour complex curves and enfolding shapes.

Obsessed with lightness, these figures seem to shy away, as soon as they are transformed into constructions, from anything that smacks of gravity and support. Even the solid parts (whence the often unorthodox or parsimonious use of facing materials, as in the 1999 project for the "acrylic tower" in Hanover) look like lines stretched between two extremes, while the elevations frequently take on the appearance of curtains, as in the case of the Cognacq-Jay Hospital in Paris (1999 onward), or of hazy screens, loath to accept the obviousness of transparency.

The implications of this research are fully evident in the most significant of the works produced by Ito in recent years, the Sendai Mediatheque (1995-2001). The construction looks like a gigantic aquarium. The glass walls filter the light inside the building, so that it appears to be flooded with a liquid illuminated in a variety of ways. The imposing structural system is subjected to torsion and the composite columns of tubular steel, which according to Ito resemble stems of seaweed, are bent along their vertical axis and create voids that run right through the building. There is nothing obscure about the metaphor: Ito entrusts the filaments floating in the aquarium with the task of freeing the space from any image that might evoke necessity, need or use.

Inside this suspended void, amidst mute and gaping scenery animated solely by the structural metamorphoses that traverse it, contemporary life is offered as a frozen spectacle to the people who swim among the unresolved paradoxes that are presented in such arbitrary fashion.