My fascination on Toyo Ito’s works

Toyo Ito, I believe many of you are familiar with his works, such as TOD’s Omotesando, Fukuoka I Project, Mikimoto Ginza, and (in my opinion) the infamous Sendai Mediatheque. I first encounter his works in an old GA Document from my campus’ digital library, which was a kindergarten in Germany. Its formal language, how the form of mass seems to create a dialogue with the courtyard within the site, and in the big picture, his effort to create an architecture, (in his own word) an ephemeral or blurring architecture, is so intriguing, that I continue to follow the traces of this Japanese architect.

I was lucky to experience one of his exhibitions in Tokyo, back in 2006, which according to my opinion is one of the best architecture exhibitions I have ever seen (probably because I haven’t seen many of them, exhibitions.). It felt like finding treasures hidden beneath the soil of a holy land. All of the secrets, how a project develops, how early sketches define the real construction, up to how the structure of his elements of architecture made and put together explained in a simple and understandable manner. All those projects displayed there explained not only by posters or by visual graphics, but also through several one by one-scale models, in one room, they even displyed Ito's wavy curvy flooring which was used on Kagamigahara project, Meiso no Mori. (too bad that taking picture was forbidden at that place.)

Here are several pictures of his works I was able to see with my own eyes, simply a wonderful experience, because architecture is about experiencing space, not only understanding the aesthetics of forms, i believe so.

TOD's Omotesando

photograph courtesy of Harry Kurniawan

Sendai Mediatheque

photograph courtesy of Harry Kurniawan

Crematorium at Kagamigahara

At that time, Ito’s wavy, undulating roof forms, as exposed in his works, such as, I project in Fukuoka, and a crematorium in Kagamigahara (as pictured above) looks new and inspiring to me.