Toyo Ito was born in 1941 in Seoul (then Japanese Korea) and grew up in Tokyo. He studied at the University of Tokyo, graduating in 1965, and worked for a few years with Kiyonori Kikutake — one of the founders of Metabolism — before opening his own studio in 1971. The first phase of his career was influenced by the counterculture of the 1970s: he designed “White U” (1976), a house for his recently widowed sister, and later the “Pao for the Tokyo Nomad Woman” (1985): the idea of a life without roots, without weight. Architecture as weightlessness. As liberation.
The Tower of the Winds in Yokohama (1986) is a building-installation: a cylinder 21 metres high covering a ventilation shaft for the metro — in practice, an industrial chimney. Ito transforms it into an interface between the city and environmental data. The cladding is mirror panels. Around the cylinder, 1,280 light bulbs and 12 neon rings, controlled by computers that read the wind and the noise of the city. At night, the tower changes colour and pattern in response to the environment. It is not a building in the traditional sense — it is a machine that translates invisible data (wind, noise) into visible phenomena (light). It is architecture as sensory interface.
The Sendai Mediatheque
The Sendai Mediatheque (2001) is the project with which Ito reached maturity. The brief: a library-mediatheque on seven floors, with different functions on each floor. The structure is radically different from any previous building: it has no structural walls, no conventional columns. Instead it has 13 “tubes” — bundles of very slender columns interwoven like seaweed — that run vertically through the building's 7 floors. The tubes contain the stairs, lifts, services and light wells. The floors are light steel slabs, almost free, hung from the tubes. The façades are transparent glass on all four sides.
But let us return to the structure. Sendai's “tubes” are not columns — they are organisms. Each has a different form and diameter, changes geometry from one floor to the next, tilts slightly from the vertical. The effect inside is of being in a forest of slender vertical elements — not rigid and regular like columns, but organic and variable like trees. It is the first time in the history of architecture that the structure of a large public building has been conceived in these terms — not as a geometric grid but as a biological system.
Tod's Omotesando and structure as ornament
Tod's Omotesando in Tokyo (2004) is a commercial building — a six-storey flagship store for the Italian leather-goods brand — that Ito turns into a theoretical case. The problem: how to make a glass building on one of Tokyo's busiest commercial streets (the tree-lined Omotesando avenue, whose century-old zelkovas were planted in the 1920s) without producing yet another anonymous transparent box? The solution: the façade is a concrete structure in the form of elm branches — the same kind of tree as on the street. The concrete branches interweave across the whole façade like a plant trellis; the fields between the branches are glass. The structure of the façade is the façade.
It is not a decorative trick: the structure of branches actually holds up the building, distributing loads in an unconventional way through the interweaving. Ito asked a structural engineer (Mutsuro Sasaki, the same as for the Mediatheque) to verify that the geometry of the branches worked structurally. The biological form is engineering-checked — the same collaboration as the Mediatheque, applied to the façade instead of the vertical structure. The result is a building in which you cannot separate structure from architecture, technique from aesthetics. It is Ito's program taken to its logical consequence: if nature produces forms that are structurally efficient and beautiful at the same time, architecture must find the same forms.
The Sendai earthquake and Home-for-All
On 11 March 2011, the Great Tōhoku Earthquake and the tsunami that followed destroyed vast areas of northern Japan — including the city of Sendai, where Ito had built his Mediatheque. The building survived — the tube structure performs well in earthquakes — but the surrounding district was devastated. Ito responded to the disaster not with a reconstruction project but with a civic initiative: “Home-for-All” (Minna no Ie) — a series of small communal structures built in the affected areas, designed together with local communities, to give a meeting place to people who had lost their homes. Ito involved other Japanese architects — including Kazuyo Sejima, who had worked in his studio before founding SANAA. It is not spectacular architecture — it is necessary architecture. And it is perhaps the most honest project of his career: it is built not for publications or prizes, but because people need a place to be together.