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Excerpts and photos from “Space Odyssey: Ito Toyo’s Sendai Médiathèque building epitomizes his groundbreaking architecture, exploring the frontiers of public and private, the real and virtual,” Japan, December/January 2001
“Ito Toyo’s architecture is a paradox: outrageously ambitious and unshakably down-to-earth. His latest project, the Sendai Médiathèque, is being hailed internationally as one of the defining buildings of our era. It is a tour de force of design innovation, groundbreaking structural thinking, new materials and adventurous contstruction techniques. Since completion earlier this year, it has featured in almost every architecture and design magazine in the world. But despite the stunning originality of the Médiathèque’s design, and the tremendous technical achievements of the building’s construction, what Ito is most interested in talking about is the way the building is used - that mothers can watch their kids in the children’s library while they leaf through magazines nearby; how groups of senior citizens receiving lessons in basic computer skills share computer facilities with wired-since-birth teens; that young couples use the library by reading together on comfortable benches overlooking the leafy, tree-lined boulevard on which the Médiathèque stands.
“ ‘The most important thing we wanted to do with the Médiathèque,’ Ito says, ‘was change the program of Japanese public buildings. In the past, Japanese authorities have basically created facilities to accommodate predictable activities in pre-established ways. Buildings like libraries or museums are usually very conventional and very fixed - and very boring! However, people conduct themselves a bit more freely and cheerfully out on the streets. Why can’t they have more individual leeway inside public facilities? I wanted to restore vitality and joy to the spaces.’ ”
“’After the competition there was a great deal of discussion, especially in the local government,’ Ito says. ‘Many of them wanted to change the name to make it easier to understand; calling it, for example, Sendai Cultural Center. But I thought the name was excellent. It forced everyone to think about what the building could be. There was no fixed answer’.”
“Ito just celebrated his kanreki, a special 60th-birthday event associated with the Chinese zodiac. The event connotes renewal, a new start, a resetting of the calendar - easy to imagine for the architect, who has the appearance and energetic demeanor of a 45-year-old. In the hope of escaping the grinding complexity and manifold constraints of large projects, Ito recently considered closing his practice and starting all over again with just a couple of staff to work only on houses and small projects. ‘But it’s too late for that,’ he says with a smile of someone who accepts success rather than craves it. Whether producing small homes or tower blocks, Ito Toyo will continue to quietly revolutionize the architectural world.”
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