Japanese architect Toyo Ito garnered the field’s highest honor this week, which sent me looking for some of his buildings online.
A couple of finds:
The Tama Art University Library. (Heavy materials used lightly, and evoking that other great library, subject of an exhibit at MOMA up now, the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris. )
I’m naturally interested in how an iconoclast takes on a commission of an opera house, and here is a photo of a model of Ito’s Taichung Metropolitan Opera House in Taiwan (now under construction).
Hard to get my head around where the theater itself will be and how will it will work, but fascinating in itself that this isn’t obvious.
Some nice words from the Pritzker jury in Ito’s citation:
Although Mr. Ito has built a great number of buildings in his career, in my view, he has been working on one project all along, — to push the boundaries of architecture. And to achieve that goal, he is not afraid of letting go what he has accomplished before.” — Yung Ho Chang, Member of the Pritzker Jury for 2013
A Few Reasonable Words 