Toyo Ito

Born 1941 · Japanese · 19 buildings on the wall

Toyo Ito (born 1941) is a Japanese architect known for light, open, conceptual buildings that try to express both the physical world and the virtual, information-filled city. Born in Seoul to Japanese parents, he worked for Kiyonori Kikutake before opening his own studio in Tokyo in 1971, and he won the Pritzker Prize in 2013.

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His early ideas were tested on small houses such as the Silver Hut (1984), his own home; a Silver Hut now forms part of his architecture museum on Ōmishima island in Imabari. The Sendai Mediatheque (2001) holds a library, a film and media collection and a theatre inside an almost cubic glass box. Its seven floor plates, a honeycomb of steel filled with lightweight concrete, rest on thirteen irregular steel tubes that rise like a forest. The building came through the March 2011 earthquake with little or no damage. The Tama Art University Library in Tokyo (2007) is built from thin arches of steel plate and concrete that span up to 12 metres. Toyo Ito's projects are studied for how a new idea of structure can open up the plan of a building.

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