Snapshots of our physical selves and the outside world.

Interview with Toyo Ito

October 2008, the Japanese architect Toyo Ito was handed out the Kiesler Prize by Andreas
Mailath-Pokorny, Viennas City Councillor for Culture and Science. Without a doubt Toyo
Ito is one of the most remarkable and influential architects from the last decades. Houses like
White U for his sister, in the nineteen seventies, were silent universes in themselves. In the
nineteen eighties, Itos work celebrated nomadic life and the mediatisation of our world with
light and open constructions, like his own house Silver Hut and the Tower of Winds, one
of the first buildings almost solely consisting of an interactive media installation. As a
theoretician and curator, he regularly expressed his ideas in writings, installations and
exhibitions. The mediatheque in Sendai, realized between 1997 and 2000, became a turning
point in his work, which ever since goes through stunning transformations, largely enabled
through intensive collaborations with the most innovative structural engineers. These lead to
adventurous projects like the Taichung Metropolitan Opera House in Taiwan. More important
than that, Ito has been calling for a new relationship between architecture and the natural
environment beyond modernism. As a member of the jury for the Kiesler Prize 2008, which
furthermore consisted of Sabine Breitwieser, Thomas Demand, Jrg Gleiter, and Andrs
Plffy, Bart Lootsma was able to interview Toyo Ito in Vienna. Even if Toyo Ito speaks
English quite well, he preferred to have Hiromi Hosoya, a former collaborator now architect
in Zrich and professor at the Academy of Arts in Vienna, as an interpreter.
Mr. Ito, what does it mean to you to receive the Kiesler prize?
I am very, very honoured. I was really surprised when I received the news. I saw Kieslers
project of the Endless House in a magazine called Tushi Shintaku when I graduated, which
was 1965. It showed many new and avant-garde projects from all over the world. When I first
saw the project, I was very impressed and I remember it very well. I also know that he has
done stage design.
You admire the composer Toru Takemitsu, as I have read, which is interesting for many
reasons. Seiji Ozawa, who is a conductor here in Vienna, once wrote that he was very proud
of his friend because he was the first Japanese composer to write for a world audience and
also to achieve a kind of international recognition. What does that mean for you? You may
not be the first Japanese architect who achieve world recognition, but that does it mean for
you to work globally as a Japanese architect?
I respect and like the work of Mister Takamitsu very much. I am simply very happy to receive
this price as we are in the area where Mister Takemitsu and Mr. Ozawa are active. Mr.
Takemitsu is very avant-garde and at the same time composing a kind of Japaneseness in his
music. I really wish I could achieve something similar in my architecture.
Mr. Ozawa comes back to Japan once every year to the Nagano prefecture, and does a
festival. I designed the opera in Nagano, which was realized in 2004. This summer, I saw an
opera there, which Mr. Osawa conducted. I also designed a stage for an opera Seiji Ozawa
conducted, The Marriage of Figaro.
Toru Takemitsu was a composer combining Japanese traditional music with the European
avant-garde of the first half of the 20th Century, from Claude Debussy and John Cage to
French composer Olivier Messiaen. When we visited your house in 1992 with a group of 20
Dutch architects, one of the things that struck us, apart from the house itself and how it was
and how beautifully situated, looking over the city of Tokyo and White U below, was that you

still had a traditional Japanese tea pavilion in the house. You have written a lot on modernity
but how does that relate to tradition in your work?
When I was a student in the nineteen sixties, Kenzo Tange was most active. Nobody talked
about Japanese tradition. Everybody was looking towards the West. The question was how to
bring or integrate the western modernization into the Japanese society. I can clearly say that at
the time I was not aware of thinking about any tradition or japaneseness. But thinking in
retrospect when I look back, then maybe there are some parts of White U that have been
influenced by traditional Japanese design. Today I like Mister Takemitsus literary texts, his
essays and of course his music as well. And I am truly influenced by his writings. Perhaps the
reason is the sensuality you can actually feel from his essays. Thats more Japanese and that
part I like a lot.
In general when you think about architecture today or architecture theory: should
architecture become more of a global thing or is it still something that is related to specific
cultures?
In general I believe that currently working on the organization is setting the tone. Architecture
is the product of the economy. However I would like to think that there are some specific
islands remaining. I do not mean, lets say: Europe as an island or islands within Europe.
Nobody knows about the locality of these specific locations or places but you know through
the conversation with people. As a result you can make something specific in the context.
That is how I believe one can make new or interesting architecture.
You have often expressed your worries about globalisation and that everything will become
the same. But isnt this a period in which there is more diversity in architecture than ever?
And on the other hand, if you think about the specific qualities that you find important: are
they in people, individual people or do they relate to cultures and traditons?
If it is about an architect, they are individual. But at the same time they are connected to the
way people are brought up, and grew up. There is always a link to the society or cultural
background. In the way I express myself there is automatically a link to society.
However, in architecture and in the specific location, there are always users. There are people
who look at and use buildings. Then the question becomes if architecture is not also
something more general. This is however difficult to point out. Perhaps the question has to do
with these peoples cultural imagination, how they adapt or interpret the buildings.
In this sense I think European society is quite mature. People are able to adapt different kinds
of thinking. In Japan, different kinds of architecture are accepted, but there is no
communication about this specific topic.
You once also wrote that architecture and other creative practices often draw their
inspiration from the sense of frustration and anger about the world outside. Is that still an
important issue for you this kind of anger? Your work looks so serene in many ways.
I have done most of my architecture in Japan and I believe that the Japanese society is still
conservative. I wish change. So, of course I still have anger and frustration in this context.
This gives me energy. But the source of that energy I can still fight with.
As an emigrant myself, I always had the feeling that when you are in your own country, you
are of course supposed to feel at home. That is of course not necessarily the case, but that if
you are abroad you are allowed not to feel at home and that makes it easier.
I really feel like that too. The frustration I feel in foreign countries is not about design or
design processes, but starts when it comes to construction.

You refer to Tokyo as being a simulated city. Your work is for that reason looks light and
ephemeral, but at the same time it is very concrete in material and you invest a lot of time in
precise detailing, in materialization and so on. So how does the materiality of building relate
to this idea of the ephemeral of the simulated city?
When I was talking about the ephemeral architecture, like fashion or a global product, and my
architecture was called light, that mostly happened in 1980s when the Japanese economy was
still in the period of the bubble economy. At that time I didnt have any opportunity to do
public architecture. I was a little bit cynical.
But then in 1990s I became engaged in designing public architecture and found out that
ephemeral architecture is not so easy to realize. Than the anger and frustration started we just
talked about. The Sendai Mediateque, designed in 1995 and opened in 2001, was the line
where my thinking about architecture has changed. Al the lightness and the ephemeral from
the design would be gone. I reconsidered materials, for example concrete or steel. I changed
the way I thought about design and the implementation of architecture to deal with the enemy
which were of course the city officials. To convince them that architecture can be done.
In Sendai you can see that your work somehow gets heavier in materialization, the structure
becomes indeed more massive. Also you seem to become more interested shapes and
structures that have a more defined inside and outside.
Certainly true. From that period on the thinking about structural engineering has also changed,
for example in Japan by Mr. Sasaki. By cooperating with engineers like Mr. Sasaki I think I
was able to design more organic or free, or you can also say more dynamic or complicated.
They are almost like co-designers, they part of the design process from the very beginning. As
soon as I have a sort of image they come in and through the conversation that develops
between us we arrive at a project.
In the mid-90ies there was a period in which in the United States, but also in the rest of the
world, designing with the computer and with new software became an opportunity. Greg
Lynn, Asymptote, Kolatan McDonald and many others tried to explore it to create new forms.
You havent chosen that direction, even when you were almost there at that moment your
work changed. Why did you not consider that direction?
It has something to do with the society. Of course at the beginning of the Sendai mediatheque
project I was thinking about this kind of imaginary generative processes. I was even thinking
about them throughout the process of realization of the Sendai project. But when it was
completed I experienced that the citizens of Sendai actually did come into the building with
buggies and kids, as if they use a park in the city. This observation, this experience gave me a
new sort of braveness to construct architecture. I was surprised because I thought the building
was too avant-garde but than at the same time people seemed to be able to use it really well. It
surprised me how it matched and that gave me the idea that I could continue.
You have written a lot on the effects of media on architecture. You have also designed
exhibitions and projects that related to it. All these projects, particulary the Tower of
Winds, impressed us enormously when we saw them in the early 90s. You could say that the
Tower of Winds is even a kind of medium in itself, reacting to the winds, the light, the
humidity and the noises in its surrounding with thousands of stroboscopic lights. Not just like
a television or a radio, but almost a medium like a crystal ball. As if it was mediating
something transcendental and metaphysical.
Lets now return to Toru Takemitsu, who was very much inspired by composers like Debussy
and Messiaen who still had a very romantic notion about a nature that was transcendental.
Yet you have said about the images in for example the exhibition Visions of Japan from
1991 in London, that there was nothing behind them.

How did you see that today? Do you find it important that there is something mysterious
about these projects or do you really see them as something that is just the digital information
and that there is nothing behind?
Those projects still belong to the nineteen eighties. In that period I had the feeling that it was
important to show the gap between the imaginary city and the real city. As if you have this
beautiful image of the city in a dream, but once when you wake up in the morning, everything
is gone.
However after the bubble economy collapsed I think the quiet Tokio returned in the late 90ies.
Tokyo may still be an interesting city, but not so exciting. Maybe it is me that has changed. In
the 1980ies, I felt like my physical body was somehow separated from a virtual or imaginary
reality. Today they somehow come together. Perhaps lately the physical sense of ourselves is
changing. I think it is no longer necessary to express feelings of alienation, using words like
ephemeral. Maybe two things come together: one is about my consciousness of the imagery of
the urban environement. The other one is the fact I actually exist, physically. Maybe I can
combine these two and express them in architecture in a different way, for example in the
relationship between man and nature. Not that we should return to nature to become primitive
again, not like that. But I believe our contemporary society can have a new relationship to
nature. That is not something I can clearly express or explain. But I believe in the possibilities
that lay in this kind of thinking.
You have written that you have always conceived of your architecture as superimposing it on
a garden or that do you see your work as gardens. Lately this seems to have become a very
important tendency or trend in Japanese architecture, when you look at the work of SANAA
and the role plants or gardens have in it, or at the architects Junya Ishigami and Hideaki
Ohba, who exhibited at the Biennale in Venice in 2008 this year. In all this work there is this
very precise new relationship between inside and outside, between plants and nature, old and
new. Is that in general an important issue at the moment? For you it always was, but it seems
to be gaining importance.
I do not know what the younger generation thinks. But if I really try hard to find a common
link: in Japan there is not a clear definition between inside and outside. That is culturally
defined. It is the same with the borderline between the city and the garden and you can also
say that within modern architecture the definition is very unclear.
Part my agenda had to do something with dealing with modernism in architecture and so I
always wanted to solve this issue. But it will not be easy. In a general sense architecture
means that there is nature and you have to create new order in itself. So there is a creative in
between. However at the same time I like to diminish this line and try to create homogeneity
between inside and outside. Perhaps I will not solve this problem in my whole life. This is the
biggest dilemma I have. Still this issue is the most important to me.