2013 Pritzker Winner Toyo Ito Finds Inspiration In Air, Wind And Water
On the phone from his offices in Tokyo — the most densely populated city in the world — Ito says "air and wind and water," are the forces that drive him aesthetically. "These metaphors that I find in nature, that's always the inspiration for my architecture," he explains.
Ito's architecture creates fluidity between nature and humanity. When people enter his completely solar-powered stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, for example, he wants them to be able to feel the wind and feel the air. Too often, he believes, urban environments feel intended to keep us apart. He wants to redesign them to bring us together.
"Because there are a lot of big cities in the world, people who live in cities have become more isolated than ever," he says. "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."
To that end, Toyo Ito built a mediatheque — a kind of cutting-edge public library — in Sendai, Japan, back in 2001. It's a transparent cube, composed of tubes and platforms. University of California, Berkley, architecture professor Dana Buntrock says the latticed design is incredibly light and open.
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