An Appreciative Look At Toyo Ito

http://www.latime.com/travel/style/la-ig-toyo-ito-architecture-20150322-column.html#pages=1

Toyo Ito
arcspace.com

Hello Everyone:

It is a Monday, post-everyone's holiday, time to get back to the blogosphere full speed ahead.

Today we are going to look at Christopher Hawthorne's long-standing fascination with Pritzker Prize winning (2013) Japanese contemporary architect Toyo Ito.  Mr. Hawthorne writes about his fascination with Mr. Ito's work in his article, "Toyo Ito's architecture beckons a critic to Asia."  The Los Angeles Times architecture critic found himself in Japan a few years ago, madly plotting the most expedient route to the Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture on the southern island of Omishima.  (http://www.tima-imabari.jp/en/) Mr. Hawthorne indulges his readers in a fantasy Ito Tour of Asia which takes us to Japan and Taiwan.  It is an appreciative tour of the Japanese architect's work and look at what great architecture can be.  In blogger's own experience of talking to civilians about Japanese architecture, yours truly has been dismayed to discover that most peoples's conceptions Japanese architecture is largely confined to temples and teahouses.  To do that would mean dismissing a large and fascinating body of architecture that gave form to its connection to the culture.

Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture
Toyo Ito
Imabari, Japan
latimes.com

Christopher Hawthorne writes,

Since the economic crisis of 2008, there's been a substantial backlash against the idea that critics should write exclusively, or even mostly, about stand-alone buildings by prominent architects. We've found broader and more complex ways to explore the relationship between architecture and society.

The cudgel of the word mash up "starchitecture" has lost its strength.  However, Mr. Hawthorne asks us to make an exception for Mr. Ito's work.  What makes Toyo Ito's work so compelling that it would induce our intrepid critic to fly half way around the world, scroll furiously through online ferry schedules at three in the morning (fighting jet lag), just to experience one building?  Mr. Hawthorne offers this reply, "In large part, his work appeals to even the most jaded observers of contemporary architecture because of its rich variety.  Unlike Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster or Daniel Libeskind, whose buildings are stamped with a recognizable signature, there is an elusiveness to Ito's output."  Toyo Ito has designed "...small houses, aerodynamic glass towers and low-slung, geometrically complex museum buildings."  In his book Tarzans in the Media Forest and Other Essays, architecture critic Thomas Daniell devotes an essay to Mr. Ito, titled "The Fugitive." (Daniell, 15, 2010)

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (2002)
Toyo Ito with Cecil Balmond and ARUP
Kensington Gardens, London England
archdaily.com

Toyo Ito has incorporated technology and innovative construction methods into his work without making them an obsession, which prevents his buildings from looking dated or mannered.  A project from the eighties still looks fresh today as it when it first opened. While other architects have made their reputations on their grand manifesto or eye-popping computer renderings, Mr. Ito has stake his reputation strictly on architectural terms. Simply stated, he knows how to build, to forms space "...in a way that respects traditional craftsmanship and seems utterly contemporary."  Even though Mr. Hawthorne recalled seeing other buildings by the architect in Tokyo and other cities, he tells his readers, "but there are a number of important ones I've yet to visit."  Most of Mr. Ito's buildings are in Japan, however, in 2008 was commissioned to design the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, his first building in the United States.  That project was sadly derailed by the financial crisis.  Mr. Hawthorne pines for Ito tour of Asia, stopping at all of the architect's key projects.

White U
Demolished 1997
Toyo Ito
©Koji Taki
archdaily.com

Christopher Hawthorne laments, "I wish the first stop could have been the famed U-House that Ito designed in 1976 for his sister, recently widowed, and her two daughters in Tokyo."  The house was unfortunately demolished in 1997 but remains important to the architect's career.  The house was built at time when architects were beginning to experiment with historic architectural references that would become part of postmodernism.  Mr. Ito "...designed a house that was abstract and somber, even monolithic, with the legs of the U wrapping around a courtyard and the roof sloping down to lower interior walls."  The house's untimely demise only enhanced its legend, because Mr. Ito, who designed it partly as place for his sister to mourn her husband, did not protest its demolition.  His sister left the house when she was ready to move on with her life.

Although the house no longer exists, architectural experimentation is alive and well in Tokyo, making the Japanese capital a great place to be for anyone interested in contemporary design.  Like Los Angeles, much of the innovative architecture is hidden away in the private realm.  Mr. Hawthorne writes, "Houses by the Tokyo-based architects Sou Fujimoto and Go Hasegawa and the duo Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, heir to the U-House in their layered, sophisticated minimalism, are worth seeking even if you ca only see them only from the outside.

Tod's
Toyo Ito
Tokyo, Japan
busyboo.com

Toyo Ito has also joined some of the leading contemporary architects in building luxury fashion boutiques in Tokyo along or near Omotesando in the upscale Shibuya district of the city.  Mr. Ito's store for Tod's, the Italian luxury leather goods house, is slender glass box clad in white skin resembling tree branches. It is a short distance from the Prada store by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, a Hermès store designed by Renzo Piano, and the Coach flagship store by Rem Koolhaus and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

Following a tour of Tokyo Ito buildings, the next stop on Mr. Hawthorne's fantasy tour is the Mediatheque, which opened in 2001 in Sendai.  The seven-story building, which raised Mr. Ito's international reputation, contains a library, gallery space, and community rooms-a complex set of spaces unified through clever structural means.  The design calls for the mechanical equipment to be wrapped inside thirteen vertical tubes which also compose the tower's structure, leaving each floor completely open, free of columns.

This innovative structural was initially met with suspicions about its stability but proved itself mightily

Sendai Mediathique
Toyo Ito
©Nacasa & Partner
archdaily.com

went it survived the devastating earthquake in 2011 with very little damage.  Mr. Hawthorne writes, "Mediatheque also stands out in Sendai because of its thoroughly unremarkable surroundings,  It rises on an extensively landscaped boulevard line on either side by nondescript if upscale shops, restaurants and apartment buildings."  The international accolades for the Sendai Meditheque helped Mr. Ito secure commissions outside of Japan.

Christopher Hawthorne's next stop on his Ito Tour of Asia would be Kaohsiung, Taiwan where World Games Stadium opened in 2009. Mr. Hawthorne writes, "Stadium design in the United States is an architectural backwater, with firms churning out either bland nostalgia palaces wrapped in red brick (for baseball) or sleek, oversized stacks of luxury boxes (for football)."  He describes the stadium, "...uncoils like a snake across its waterfront

World Games Stadium (2009)
Toyo Ito (also provided the photograph)
Kaohsiung, Taiwan
designboom.com

site, its skin of nearly 9,000 solar panels glinting in the sun, suggests there's life in this building type yet.  Another Taiwanese Ito building worth stopping for is the Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, "...that seems to destined to define Ito's late-career work."  The opera house is a "...hulking box of performance space, covered with a spray-on concrete skin..." creating an more anticipatory twitter among architecture critics than in another building.  The opera house is set to open in 2016 and will test whether or not the architect's "personal, patient and idiosyncratic style, which has worked so well for houses and towers with small footprints such as Mediatheque and the Tod's store, can be stretched to fit a full city block."

Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture
Toyo Ito
Imabari, Japan
flickr.com

Christopher Hawthorne's Ito Tour of Asia brings us back to the Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture in Imabari, on Omishima Island, about 300 miles southwest of Tokyo.  The island is filled with museums and cultural centers.  TIMA was designed in 2011 to showcase and celebrate the architect's career. The museum is housed in a pair buildings: a silver steel hut modeled on the architect's own 1984 house in Tokyo and a dark-brown steel hut.  Mr. Hawthorne observes,

As architect's monuments to themselves go, this one is modest.  It's also drive by an interest in stripped-down yet muscular geometry that appears almost nowhere in Ito's work.  The brown steel hut is a pile of hard-edge forms, pyramids on top of rhomboids; the silver hut is covered by a seeming mismatched collection of vaults.

This approach to design flows out of a response to the landscape.  The view of the vast ocean and curvaceous coastline is frequently hidden by clouds and rain.  Rather than mimic nature and create something equally curvilinear in a similar manner as his less trusting peers, Mr. Ito tried to give the space what was not there, "not just to avoid repeating the lines that were already there but also to carve out a powerful space for architecture to its own work."

Christopher Hawthorne's long-standing crush on Toyo Ito's work is a reminder why architectural junkies will travel far and wide to admire the work of great masters.  It makes us belief that truly great original work still exists in the world.  Buildings that do not rest on eye-popping computer drawings, grand manifestos, or fetishizing that latest construction technology.  Great work relies on responsiveness to the site, incorporating construction technology innovation into basic building methodology, and just basic good design.  Toyo Ito's work does precisely all this.