“I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.”

“Architects have made architecture too complex. We need to simplify it and use a language that everyone can understand.”

Toyo Ito

 

A creative spirit overcoming the usual orisons of design. A global vision, looking for higher motivations, so that every creation and every productive effort could be worth. This image emerges from the encounter with Toyo Ito, architect and designer from Seoul who become famous for its extreme architectural projects, half-way between the physical and the virtual world.

Discover Toyo Ito on mohd!

The first study, established in 1971 with the evocative name of Urbot (from the fusion of urban and robot) was already imbued with these ambitious premises. Since then the company, which took the name of Toyo Ito & Associated, Architects, received a rain of international recognitions for its audacious challenges.

Sendai Mediatheque, 2001.

Among all the Sendai Mediatheque, winner of the World Architecture Award in 2002, is based on one of Ito’s mayor principles: the search of a dialogue between the spontaneous logics of nature and the technological research, but also the desire of creating in architecture the society’s spontaneous variability. The pillars, released from the traditional stillness, become wavy for imitating the movements of seaweeds in a fish tank. The walls disappear, for following an image of lightness and absence of weight.

Home for all, 2012.

A more recent project, the Home for all, won the Leone d’Oro in 2012 at the Biennale di Venezia. Realized for the populations of Japan hit by the tsunami, to give them not just a house but a meeting place, the project raises interesting doubts about what a building should represent in terms of comfort, solidity and durability.

Toyo Ito, nowadays professor emeritus at the University of Northern London and visiting professor at the Columbia University, dedicates himself even to interior design, investigating on the tactile and visual potentiality of materials and on the relationship between structure and shell.

The Ripples bench, winner of Compasso d’Oro prize in 2004, immediately seduces the observer with its seat, made up with five different solid woods:  walnut, mahogany, cherry, oak and ash.

The admired imitation of natural rhythms is clear in the Moony sideboard. A compact and essential body is enriched by a series of backlit small porthole, recreating the lunar phases.

The Sendai bookshelf is an homage in small scale to the homonimus building. In fact, it repeats the same plays of transparences and the sinuosity of the structure.

The botanic motif reappears in the Konoha bench, whose name signifies “tree leaves” in Japanese. Elegant individually, the combination of many of them creates suggestive settings.

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