Toyo Ito

On November 17, Toyo Ito joined us on AnA to share his personal biography. Ito started talking about the landscape where he grew up, the Lake Suwa, in the north of Tokyo. Suwa Lake is in the middle of Japan and surrounded by mountains. This introspective landscape gave Ito a sense of interiority and closeness from the outside.

From the nature constant change, he got a sense of fluidity that influenced his architecture.

Ito exemplifies how his architecture is shaped by the “void as core” and his first project was in fact a house built around a courtyard but at the same time closed from it, with few openings.

Since his childhood water or fluidity had a big influence on Ito: people are connected through water and he defines information “invisible water”, because it connects people.

The very first sketch for the Mediatheque was conceived like a seaweed floating on the water. Through the structural tubes of the Mediatheque, people, wind and air move inside the building and circulate: that creates a fluid space not defined by walls or rooms.

A third element Ito cares about is “inner nature”. He illustrates it with a beautiful example of a sketch that shows a group of people enjoying the blossom of the cherry trees in circle, protected by cloth curtains. A simple act of surrounding the area, with a temporal structure, that creates a sacral space.

After finishing school, he started working for Kiyonori Kikutake where he got for the first time the feeling that architecture could be something that could interest him. He had to choose at first to study engineering, in order to be able to keep playing baseball.

The interest started when Kikutake told him that architecture is something that you have to think with your senses and the whole body, not with logic.

Nowadays Ito has workshop with school children where he teaches them to think about architecture. Amongst his passion he loves making wine. Making wine is like making architecture.

“You may think that making wine doesn’t have anything to do with architecture, but actually what I am finding is that there is always more to discover in architecture as well as wine making, you are never satisfied, you will just keep on searching and thinking, both in architecture and wine making.”