This is a comprehensive monograph on the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, one of the most influential figures on the contemporary architectural scene. Born in 1941, Ito started his professional career in the early 1970s with residential buildings and in the following decade was awarded his first important public commissions. Since the 1990s he has been invited to participate, all over the world, in the most important architectural competitions, including the hotly debated plan for the enlargement of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Toyo Ito has, since the 1970s, been carrying out research into building materials, light and space-research that has led him to design buildings which he himself has defined as "non material". These aerial structures, fluid and permeable spaces, avoid rigid compositional geometries. Over the years, Ito has gradually simplified his language, and his works, the obvious structure of which has increasingly disappeared, can be studied as a series of variations on the layering of the facade.
His "obsession" with lightness and transparency are expressed to the full in the most important work of his creative career, the Sendai Mediatheque (1995-2001). Through a striking series of illustrations, this book presents the Japanese architect's most significant projects, starting with the Aluminium House of 1970-1 through to the most recent project for the Mahler 4 office block in Amsterdam (2000-1). The appendix includes a complete list of Toyo Ito's works, a selection of his writings, most of them originally published in Japanese, as well as a biographical summary.
