Dame Z

Tribute to Zaha

Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid, DBE (Arabic: زها حديد‎ Zahā Ḥadīd; 31 October 1950 – 31 March 2016) was an Iraqi architect. She was the first woman and the first Muslim to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, winning it in 2004. She received the Stirling Prizein 2010 and 2011. In 2012, she was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 2015 she became the first woman to be awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in her own right.[1]

Hadid liberated architectural geometry[2] with the creation of highly expressive, sweeping fluid forms of multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry that evoke the chaos and flux of modern life.[3] A pioneer of parametricism, and an icon ofneo-futurism, with a formidable personality, her acclaimed work and ground-breaking forms include the aquatic center for the London 2012 Olympics, the Broad Art Museumin the U.S., and the Guangzhou, China opera house.[4]

On 31 March 2016, Hadid died of a heart attack in a Miami hospital, where she was being treated for bronchitis.[5][6]

http://www.zaha-hadid.com/

BMW Central Building © CNN from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.



Venice Biennale Theme ‘Common Ground’ Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.

Born in Baghdad Iraq in 1950, Zaha Hadid commenced her college studies at the American University in Beirut, in the field of mathematics. She moved to London in 1972 to study architecture at the Architectural Association and upon graduation in 1977, she joined the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). She also taught at the Architectural Association (AA) with OMA collaborators Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis.

She began her own practice in London in 1980 and won the prestigious competition for the Hong Kong Peak Club, a leisure and recreational center in 1983. Painting and drawing, especially in her early period, are important techniques of investigation for her design work. Ever since her 1983 retrospective exhibition at the AA in London, her architecture has been shown in exhibitions worldwide and many of her works are held in important museum collections.

Known as an architect who consistently pushes the boundaries of architecture and urban design, her work experiments with new spatial concepts intensifying existing urban landscapes and encompassing all fields of design, from the urban scale to interiors and furniture.

She is well-known for some of her seminal built works, such at the Vitra Fire Station (1993), Weil am Rhein, Germany, the Mind Zone at the Millennium Dome (1999) Greenwich, UK, a ski jump (2002) in Innsbruck, Austria and the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (2003) in Cincinnati, Ohio. Parallel with her private practice, Hadid has continued to be involved in academics, holding chairs and guest professorships at Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Columbia University, the University of Visual Arts in Hamburg and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

Sleuk Rith  Institute Cambodia from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.




Parametric Space - teaser from Kollision on Vimeo.
Zaha Hadid Architects [http://www.zaha-hadid.com] are working with design office Kollision [http://kollision.dk], CAVI [http://cavi.au.dk] and Wahlberg [http://www.wahlberg.dk] to create the interactive installation 'Parametric Space' for the exhibition 'Zaha Hadid - World Architecture' at the Danish Architecture Centre [http://www.dac.dk] 29 June - 29 September 2013. The installation is a fully parametric space that will react on visitors movements - in shape and expression.

The exhibition has been developed by Zaha Hadid Architects in collaboration with the Danish Architecture Centre, supported by Realdania and Kvadrat.

See the final installation here: https://vimeo.com/69356542
For more information see kollision.dk/en/parametric

Furthermore see the following link for more media architecture projects from Kollision: vimeo.com/album/1809263


Cincinnati Arts Centre © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.



Mathematics Gallery at the Science Museum, London from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.




New National Stadium Video Presentation from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.
Zaha Hadid Architects welcomes a new bidding process for the New National Stadium in order to reduce costs and ensure value for money in terms of quality, durability and long-term sustainability. This video presentation and report outlines in detail the unique design for the New National Stadium which has been thoughtfully developed over two years to be the most compact and efficient stadium for this very special location in Tokyo.


Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and our Japanese partners, the New National Stadium contains all the knowledge and expertise gained from the team’s direct experience of other Olympic, World Cup and World Championship stadia. The substantial investment in time, effort and resources already made by the Government and people of Japan into the existing team over the past two years ensures the New National Stadium can be completed in time to welcome the world to Japan in 2019 ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and become a new home for sport for many future generations of Japan’s athletes, sportsmen and women.


Global Cities at the Tate Modern © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.




Inside the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.

Michigan State University's Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum opened at MSU on November 10, 2012. Here's MSU University Advancement's sneak peak look inside at the November 9 media preview.


JS Bach / Zaha Hadid Architects Music Hall © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.




Edifici Torre Espiral © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.




Spittelau Viaducts Housing Project © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.





Salerno Maritime Terminal © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.


Habitable Bridge over the River Thames © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.




Z-Car © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.

Essay

The Architecture of Zaha Hadid 
By Joseph Giovannini
Architect and Critic

"Very few buildings can stand up to the Alps without retreating into modesty, but Zaha Hadid’s dynamic and lyrical Bergisel Ski Jump in Innsbruck, Austria, completed in 2002, confronts the surrounding mountains with an equivalent architectural majesty. At the top of a hill, the structure occupies the sky, a free-standing silhouette. Within the bowl of a valley ringed by hills and vertiginous mountains, the turning form of the clubhouse seems to gather and funnel the aerial energy of the mountainscape to the long, bowed ramp that lofts jumpers toward the city below. Hadid designed the sweeping structure from top to bottom as one fluid gesture that both summarizes the surrounding landscape in a sweep of movement, and sends skiers down a jump conceived in an act of fluid geometric empathy akin to flight.As in Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, where God nearly touches Adam’s hand to spark life, Hadid has provided the index finger that makes a visual connection between the sky and the ground. Here the spark of life is completed in the jump. The sensuous forms visualize and poeticize the leap, spiraling the mountainscape, sky and ground into a fluid continuum.

Air is Hadid’s element: she floats buildings that reside aloft. At a time, in the early 1980s, when architects were concerned about manifesting the path of gravity through buildings, Hadid invented a new anti-gravitational visual physics. She suspended weight in the same way dramatists suspend disbelief. In 1983, she won a much-published international competition for a sports club on the Peak above Hong Kong with a crystalline structure that seemed to explode from the mountainside, creating in the fragmentary fall-out a structure that evaded any sense of a unitary whole. Eruption rather than gravity was the defining force directing the path of a building that thrived in the air. Floor planes were no longer extruded up from a single foundation, stacked atop one another, but beamed out in different directions, shifting as they rose in a complex section. A highway curved through the building in the space between the splayed, airborne volumes.

Historically, the proposal broke new ground in the field, and did so radically. As original to architecture as the twelve-tone scale once was to music, the design represented architecture of a wholly different and very unexpected order. Whatever the metaphor—explosion, implosion, fragmentation—the design favored open forms rather than closed, hermetic volumes; it offered breathing porosity rather than sealed fortification. The design quickly proved a foundational thesis for architecture, an unexpected precedent for shifting Modernism’s paradigm from simplicity to complexity. The theory behind the building moved away from modernism’s ideas of mass production, received typologies and the normative, to a more complex order of a kind that privileged the unique and the fragmentary. The scheme signaled a shift in sensibilities not only from truisms of the past but also from set tenets of industrial modernism, toward an indeterminate complexity sited on shifting ground somewhere between order and chaos.

In the 1980s, many people mistakenly believed that the Peak was influenced by the use of the computer. But the influence was historical, and in the context of the Pritzker Prize, awarded this year in St. Petersburg, coincidental. The imperial Russian capital was the seat of the Russian Avant-Garde artists who inspired Hadid very early in her career.

Vladimir Malevich, who pursued a mystic fourth dimension in his paintings and architectural schemes, had studied here, and he and his pupil El Lissitzky embarked on a remarkable journey into spatial mystery in the 1910s and ’20s. Their promising experiments were aborted by a Soviet state that adopted Soviet Realism in art as official policy, and a bombastic version of classicism in architecture.The flame of discovery went out for decades.

In the 1970s, however, Hadid, a student at the Architectural Association in London, took Malevich’s abstract compositions and, giving them scale and function, turned them into architectural projects that gave life again to the vision. Courageously she set off on a course to realize ideas, such as fragmentation and layering, never built by the Suprematists themselves. Inspired by Malevich’s ethereal paintings, she took up the brush as a design tool, and for her, painted tableaux became a locus of spatial invention. With this methodology, applied in the elusive pursuit of almost intangible form, she escaped the prejudice latent in such design tools as the T-square and parallel rule, traditionally used by architects. Hadid came off the drawing boards, much as Frank Gehry did when, influenced by artists, he left behind the usual drawings to conceive his buildings sculpturally, often with his hands. Hadid abandoned the regularity of the T-square and parallel rule in buildings emancipated from the right angle..."

http://www.pritzkerprize.com/sites/default/files/file_fields/field_files_inline/2004_essay_0.pdf

About Us - Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.





Madrid Civil Courts of Justice © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.

http://www.zaha-hadid.com/archive/

(CNN) Frank Gehry: "She was a great architect and a great friend. I will miss her."

Richard Rogers: "Zaha Hadid was a radical genius -- an architect far ahead of her time. I loved Zaha and will miss her"

Norman Foster: "I think it was Zaha's triumph to go beyond the beautiful graphic visions of her sculptural approach to architecture into reality that so upset some of her critics. She was an individual of great courage, conviction and tenacity. It is rare to find these qualities tied to a free creative spirit. That is why her loss is so profound and her example so inspirational. And, besides, she was my dear friend."

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/31/europe/architect-zaha-hadid-dead/

A tribute to Zaha Hadid RA: 1950–2016

By RA Architecture

Published 31 March 2016

One of the world’s greatest architects, Zaha Hadid inspired a generation. Following the sad news of her death, the RA’s Head of Architecture and two fellow architects reflect on a visionary career.

• 
  

  
  
  
  

  Zaha Hadid RA sadly died in Miami following a heart attack on Thursday 31 March, aged 65. Announcing the news, the President of the Royal Academy, Christopher Le Brun, said: “We are shocked and saddened by the news of the passing of Dame Zaha Hadid RA. She was a visionary architect who has inspired a generation and this is a great loss for the world of architecture.” Here, Kate Goodwin, Alan Stanton RA and Peter Cook RA pay tribute.

• Kate Goodwin, RA Head of Architecture

  
  

  
  
  
  

  The news of Zaha Hadid RA’s sudden death in Miami has sent ripples across the world. Her influence and renown stretched far beyond the architectural community, with her buildings – perhaps most famously, London’s Olympic Aquatic Centre – capturing popular imagination. This Iraq-born architect inspired first with her paintings and drawings, and when she was finally given the opportunity to build she produced work which was truly visionary.

  Her architecture is keenly intellectual and equally emotionally and creatively charged. Elected a Royal Academician in 2005, she is pioneering figure; the only woman to receive the Pritzker Prize (2004) and the RIBA Gold Medal this year, again the first time to a woman in her own right. As fellow Academician and long-time friend Peter Cook said in his Gold Medal citation of Zaha, she was “larger than life, bold as brass and certainly on the case. Our Heroine.”

• Alan Stanton RA, architect and Chair of the Architecture Committee

  Zaha Hadid was a force of nature. Her creative power and strong personality pushed architecture into a new territory that, not only produced seminal buildings, but raised public awareness and encouraged debate about the very nature of architecture.

  Although Zaha had the courage to work “on the edge” of mainstream architecture (which she freely admitted was the best place to be) over recent years her practice received an increasing number of accolades and important commissions and she was building more and more. The news of her death will have come as a profound shock to architects everywhere and her presence within the world of architecture will be hugely missed.

Peter Cook RA, architect

Peter Cook RA wrote the following tribute in February, when Hadid was presented with the RIBA’s 2016 Royal Gold Medal.

In our current culture of ticking every box, surely Zaha Hadid succeeds, since (to quote the Royal Gold Medal criteria) she is someone “who has made a significant contribution to the theory or practice of architecture… for a substantial body of work rather than for work which is currently fashionable.” Indeed her work, though full of form, style and unstoppable mannerism, possesses a quality that some of us might refer to as an impeccable “eye”: which we would claim is a fundamental in the consideration of special architecture and is rarely satisfied by mere “fashion”.

And surely her work is special. For three decades now, she has ventured where few would dare: if Paul Klee took a line for a walk, then Zaha took the surfaces that were driven by that line out for a virtual dance and then deftly folded them over and then took them out for a journey into space. In her earlier, “spiky” period there was already a sense of vigour that she shared with her admired Russian Suprematists and Constructivists – attempting with them to capture that elusive dynamic of movement at the end of the machine age.

Necessarily having to disperse effort through a studio production, rather than being a lone artist, she cottoned–on to the potential of the computer to turn space upon itself. Indeed there is an Urban Myth that suggests that the very early Apple Mac “boxes” were still crude enough to plot the mathematically unlikely – and so Zaha with her mathematics background seized upon this and made those flying machine projections of the Hong Kong Peak project and the like. Meanwhile, with paintings and special small drawings Zaha continued to lead from the front. She has also been smart enough to pull in some formidable computational talent without being phased by its ways.

Thus the evolution of the “flowing” rather than spikey architecture crept up upon us in stages, as did the scale of her commissions, but in most cases, they remained clear in identity and control. When you entered the Fire Station at Vitra, you were conscious of being inside one of those early drawings and yes, it could be done. Yet at perhaps its highest, those of us lucky enough to see the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku in the flesh, can surely never have been in such a dream-like space, with its totality, its enormous internal ramp and dart-like lights seeming to have come from a vocabulary that lies so far beyond the normal architecture that we assess or rationalise.

• https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/zaha-hadid-obituary

Dancing with Data

Published on Oct 20, 2014

Professor Chris Speed, Chair of Design Informatics, presents the fourth lecture in the 2014 Our Changing World series, entitled "Dancing with Data".

This talk speculates upon a future time in which objects will begin to interact with us in different ways. Such an enquiry is part of what is being described as an Internet of Things. The term, Internet of Things, refers to the technical and cultural shift that is anticipated as society moves to a ubiquitous form of computing in which every device is on, and every physical object is connected in some way to the Internet.

The focus of the talk is to anticipate a time when the scale of data that becomes associated with physical objects is so great that it allows unforeseen patterns and opportunities to be identified.

Recorded on 14 October 2014 at the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower.

The World Wide Web and the Next 25 Years by Tim Berners Lee

The World Wide Web and the Next 25 Years by Tim Berners Lee
Via Qatar Computing Research Institute

Ila souria Competition

 Ila souria Competition > July

عبّر عن نفسك

في هذه الفترة من الانتاج الاعلامي الغزير من جميع المصادر، ولكن حيث نسمع كل شيء ما عدا رأي الشعب السوري، تقدّم “إلى سوريا” للشابات والشباب السوريين فرصة التعبير عن أنفسهم

إن معارف المختصين والجردات و تحليل المختصين من كل أنحاء العالم، كلها أشياء أساسية لا يمكن فصلها عن رأي اللاعبين الحقيقيين للثورة وخاصة الشباب الذين يساهمون غالباً، في هذا السياق المأساوي، بحياتهم لبناء المستقبل

أي مستقبل؟

لذلك تعرض “إلى سوريا” على كل واحد، السؤال التالي

ما الذي يساعدكم على البقاء والحفاظ على الامل منذ بداية الثورة؟ بأي مستقبل تحلمون؟ وكيف تفكرون بإمكانية تحقيقه؟

هناك طريقتان للإجابة على هذا السؤال

ـ إما بواسطة نص،

ـ أو بواسطة صورة ( أو الإثنين معاً للذين يرغبون بربط كلماتهم بتصوّر ما

نص مع حريّة تعبير كاملة و مطلقة (رسالة، قصة، شعر، إلخ) وصورة مع الامكانيات اللامحدودة للغة المرئية (رسوم، كاريكاتور، منحوتات، تصميم، صور، ملصقات، إلخ)

الشروط

إجابة نصية= 200 كلمة كحد أقصى باللغة العربية أو 300 كلمة باللغة الفرنسية او الانكليزية.

300 dpi مع دقة jpg إجابة صورية= الابعاد القصوى للصورة: إرتفاع 20 سم ـ العرض 15سم، مسجّلة بقطع

تجدر الإشارة إلى أن المنشور سوف ينشر بالأبيض والأسود (مستوى الرمادي):على المبتكر إذاً أن يأخذ بعين الاعتبار هذه المعطيات الاساسية في تكوين اللون، إما من خلال العمل مباشرة على هذه الثنائية أو عبر اختيار الالوان الملائمة في الاطار المفروض

نطلب من الجميع الالتزام بهذه الشروط لاسباب تتعلق بالتصميم الرسمي الذي علينا تسليمه للطابع.

من المستحسن تحديد الاسم او العائلة او اسم مستعار والعمر ومكان الاقامة الحالي والمعتاد (للنازحين والمنفيين

ستنشر الردود على الانترنت على موقع “إلى…” و مجموعة مختارة ستنشر (كتاب، حجم 24ـ 18سم) باللغة العربية او الفرنسية او الانكليزية مع نشر أعمال المؤتمر الاول لإلى…، إلى سوريا.01، اللذي سيقام في معهد العالم العربي في باريس، في تشرين الاول المقبل

يجب ارسال النصوص والصور المقترحة بالبريد الالكتروني وذلك قبل ٧ تموز ٢٠١٣ على العنوان التالي

ila.alaati@gmail.com

نشكركم على تعريف اصدقائكم و معارفكم على هذه المبادرة. و ننتظر شهاداتكم بفارغ الصبر

إلى سوريا

http://www.ilasouria.org/الصفحة-الرئيسية-welcome/

EXPRIMEZ-VOUS !

Dans cette période de foisonnement médiatique de toutes origines mais où l’on entend tout sauf l’opinion du peuple syrien, Ila Souria propose aux jeunes syriennes et syriens de s’exprimer.

Les savoirs de spécialistes, les inventaires et état des lieux, les analyses d’expériences de par le monde,
toutes choses essentielles ne peuvent être dissociées de l’opinion publique, et donc de celle des véritables acteurs de la révolution, en particulier des jeunes, qui dans ce contexte tragique contribuent, de leur vie souvent, à construire l’avenir .

Quel avenir ?
Aussi, Ila Souria soumet à chacun la question suivante :
Qu’est-ce qui vous aide à tenir et à garder espoir depuis le début de la révolution ?
De quel avenir rêvez-vous ? Comment pensez-vous pouvoir le réaliser ?

Deux façons de répondre à cette interrogation :
- soit par un texte,
- soit par une image (soit les deux pour certains qui voudraient associer une représentation à leurs mots).

Texte avec une totale liberté d’expression (lettre, récit, poésie, etc.) et image avec une infinité de possibilités de langages visuels (dessins, caricatures, sculptures, maquettes, photographies, collages, etc.).

Contraintes :
Réponse textuelle = maximum de 200 mots en langue arabe et de 300 mots en langue française ou anglaise.
Réponse graphique = dimension maximum de l’image : hauteur 20 cm – largeur 15 cm, enregistrée au format jpg avec une résolution de 300 dpi.

A noter que la publication sera éditée en noir et blanc (niveau de gris) : au créateur donc de prendre en considération cette donnée essentielle dans sa composition colorimétrique, soit en travaillant directement dans cette bichromie soit en choisissant les “bonnes“ couleurs dans le cadre imposé.

Nous vous demandons à tous de bien respecter ces contraintes pour des raisons pratiques liées à la maquette graphique que nous aurons à remettre à l’imprimeur.

Il est souhaitable d’indiquer les prénom et nom ou le pseudonyme, l’âge, le lieu de vie actuel et habituel (pour les déplacés ou les exilés).

Les réponses seront publiées en ligne sur le site ILA… et une sélection des réponses reçues sera publiée (livre, format 24x18cm) en arabe, français et anglais avec une parution pour le premier colloque de ILA…, Ilasouria.01, qui se déroulera à l’Institut du monde arabe à Paris en octobre prochain.

Les textes et les images proposés devront être adressés par mail à ila.alaati@gmail.com et cela impérativement avant le 07 juillet 2013.

Merci de faire connaître cette initiative, à vos proches et connaissances. Nous attendons avec impatience vos témoignages !

http://www.ilasouria.org/exprimez-vous/

HAVE YOUR SAY !

There is no shortage of opinions in the media about the situation in Syria. It seems everybody has something to say – but we’re not getting to hear from the Syrians themselves. That is why Ila Souria is reaching out to the young people of Syria, so their voices can be heard.

Specialists’ input, inventories and assessments of the state of affairs, analyses of pertinent experiences around the world… all are essential ingredients that cannot be dissociated from public opinion and the feedback of those who are directly involved in the revolution—especially young people who, in this tragic context, in many cases are giving their very lives to help build the country’s future.

What kind of future lies ahead?

Ila Souria would like people to consider the following questions:
What has given you hope, and kept your hope alive, since the beginning of the revolution? What kind of future do you dream of? How do you think it can be achieved?

There are two ways to submit your answers:
– in written format
– in visual format (or both, for those who wish to combine images and words).
Your written contributions can take any form you like (letter, story, poem, etc.) as can your visuals (drawings, caricatures, sculptures, models, photographs, collages, etc.).

Conditions:
Written contribution: Maximum of 200 words in Arabic or 300 words in French or English.
Visual contribution: Maximum height of 20 cm and maximum width of 15 cm, submitted in JPG format, resolution 300 dpi.
Please note that the final document will be published in black and white (grey scale). Creators should therefore take this into consideration in their colour choices and composition, either by working directly in black and white or by choosing an easily adaptable colour palette.
All contributors are asked to kindly adhere to these limits, which are required to meet practical printing considerations.
It is preferable to include your full name or pseudonym with your contribution, as well as your age, your current place of residence and your usual place of residence (for those who are displaced or in exile).
Contributions will be posted on the ILA website, and a selection will be included in a book (24 cm x 18 cm) to be published in Arabic, French and English. The book will be launched at the Ilasouria.01 symposium, which will be held at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris in October 2013.

All contributions must be sent by email to ila.alaati@gmail.com by July 7, 2013, at the very latest.

Be sure to spread the word about this initiative to as many people as possible.
We look forward to hearing from you!

Toyo Ito :: 2013 Laureate

http://www.pritzkerprize.com/2013/announcement

Biography

Toyo Ito was born on June 1, 1941 in Keijo (Seoul), Korea (Japanese). His father was a business man with a special interest in the early ceramic ware of the Yi Dynasty of Korea and Japanese style paintings. He also was a sports fan of baseball and golf. In 1943, Ito, his mother, and his two elder sisters moved back to Japan. Two years later, his father returned to Japan as well, and they all lived in his father’s hometown of Shimosuwa-machi in Nagano Prefecture. His father died in 1953, when he was 12. After that the rest of family operated a miso (bean paste) making factory. At present, all but one sister who is three years older than Ito, have died.
Ito established his own architecture office in 1971, and the following year he married. His wife died in 2010. They had one daughter who is now 40 and is editing Vogue Nippon.
In his youth, Ito admits to not having a great interest in architecture. There were several early influences however. His grandfather was a lumber dealer, and his father liked to draw plans for his friends’ houses. When Ito was a freshman in high school, his mother asked the early Modernist architect, Yoshinobu Ashihara, who had just returned to Japan from the U.S. where he worked at Marcel Breuer’s office, to design their home in Tokyo.
He was in the third grade of junior high school when he moved to Tokyo and went to Hibiya High School. At the time, he never dreamed he would become an architect—his passion was baseball. It was while attending the University of Tokyo that architecture became his main interest. For his undergraduate diploma design, he submitted a proposal for the reconstruction of Ueno Park, which won the top prize of the University of Tokyo.
Toyo Ito began working in the firm of Kiyonori Kikutake & Associates after he graduated from Tokyo University’s Department of Architecture in 1965. By 1971, he was ready to start his own studio in Tokyo, and named it Urban Robot (Urbot). In 1979, he changed the name to Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects.
He has received numerous international awards, including in 2010, the 22nd Praemium Imperiale in Honor of Prince Takamatsu; in 2006, The Royal Institute of British Architects’ Royal Gold Medal; and in 2002, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for the 8th Venice Biennale International Exhibition. All of his honors are listed in the fact summary of this media kit. He has been a guest professor at the University of Tokyo, Columbia University, the University of California, Los Angeles, Kyoto University, Tama Art University, and in the spring semester of 2012, he hosted an overseas studio for Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the first in Asia.
His works have been the subject of museum exhibitions in England, Denmark, the United States, France, Italy, Chile, Taiwan, Belgium, and numerous cities in Japan. Publications by and about him have appeared in all of those countries and more. He holds Honorary Fellowships in the American Institute of Architects, Royal Institute of British Architects, the Architecture Institute of Japan, the Tokyo Society of Architects and Building Engineers, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
One of his first projects in 1971 was a home in a suburb of Tokyo. Called “Aluminum House,” the structure consisted of wooden frame completely covered in aluminum. Most of his early works were residences. In 1976, he produced a home for his sister, who had recently lost her husband. The house was called “White U” and generated a great deal of interest in Ito’s works. It was demolished in 1997. Of most of his work in the 1980’s, Ito explains that he was seeking to erase conventional meaning from his works through minimalist tactics, developing lightness in architecture that resembles air and wind.
He calls the Sendai Mediatheque, completed in 2001 in Sendai City, Miyagi, Japan, one of the high points of his career. In the Phaidon book, Toyo Ito, he explains, “The Mediatheque differs from conventional public buildings in many ways. While the building principally functions as a library and art gallery, the administration has actively worked to relax divisions between diverse programs, removing fixed barriers between various media to progressively evoke an image of how cultural facilities should be from now on. This openness is the direct result of its simple structure, consisting of flat concrete slabs (which are honey-comb steel plates with concrete) penetrated by 13 tubes. Walls on each floor are kept to an absolute minimum, allowing the various functions to be freely distributed throughout the open areas between the tubes.“
In delivering the Kenneth Kassler lecture at Princeton University in 2009, Ito explained his general thoughts on architecture:
“The natural world is extremely complicated and variable, and its systems are fluid – it is built on a fluid world. In contrast to this, architecture has always tried to establish a more stable system. To be very simplistic, one could say that the system of the grid was established in the twentieth century. This system became popular throughout the world, as it allowed a huge amount of architecture to be built in a short period of time.
However, it also made the world’s cities homogenous. One might even say that it made the people living and working there homogenous too. In response to that, over the last ten years, by modifying the grid slightly I have been attempting to find a way of creating relationships that bring buildings closer to their surroundings and environment.” Ito amends that last thought to “their natural environment.”
In the fashionable Omotesando area of Tokyo, Ito designed a building in 2004 for TOD’S, an Italian shoe and handbag company, in which trees provided a source of inspiration. The Ito office provides its own description of the project:
“Trees are natural objects that stand by themselves, and their shape has an inherent structural rationality. The pattern of overlapping tree silhouettes also generates a rational flow of forces. Having adapted the branched tree diagram, the higher up the building, the thinner and more numerous the branches become, with a higher ration of openings. Similarly, the building unfolds as interior spaces with slightly different atmospheres relating to the various intended uses.
Rejecting the obvious distinctions between walls and opening, lines and planes, two- and three dimensions, transparency and opaqueness, this building is characterized by a distinctive type of abstractness. The tree silhouette creates a new image with a constant tension generated between the building’s symbolic concreteness and its abstractness. For this project, we (Ito and his staff) intended to create a building that through its architectural newness expresses both the vivid presence of a fashion brand and strength in the cityscape that will withstand the passage of time.”
After designing critically-acclaimed buildings like Sendai Mediatheque, Ito became an architect of international importance during the early-2000s leading to projects throughout Asia, Europe, North America and South America. Ito designed the Main Stadium for the 2009 World Games in Kaohsiung and the under-construction Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, both in Taiwan. In Europe, Ito and his firm renovated the façade of the Suites Avenue Apartments with striking stainless steel waves and, in 2002, designed the celebrated temporary Serpentine Pavilion Gallery in London’s Hyde Park. Other projects during this time include the White O residence in Marbella, Chile and the never-built University of California, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive in California.
Perhaps most important to Ito, however, are the projects in his home country, made more pressing by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. The disaster spurred Ito and a group of other Japanese architects to develop the concept of “Home-for-All” communal space for survivors. As Ito says in Toyo Ito - Forces of Nature published by Princeton Architectural Press:
“The relief centers offer no privacy and scarcely enough room to stretch out and sleep, while the hastily tacked up temporary housing units are little more than rows of empty shells: grim living conditions either way. Yet even under such conditions, people try to smile and make do…. They gather to share and communicate in extreme circumstances – a moving vision of community at its most basic. Likewise, what we see here are very origins of architecture, the minimal shaping of communal spaces.
An architect is someone who can make such spaces for meager meals show a little more humanity, make them a little more beautiful, a little more comfortable.”
For Ito, the fundamental tenets of modern architecture were called into question by “Home-for-All.” He adds, “In the modern period, architecture has been rated highest for its originality. As a result, the most primal themes—why a building is made and for whom—have been forgotten. A disaster zone, where everything is lost offers the opportunity for us to take a fresh look, from the ground up, at what architecture really is. ‘Home-for-all’ may consist of small buildings, but it calls to the fore the vital question of what form architecture should take in the modern era—even calling into question the most primal themes, the very meaning of architecture.”
The Pritzker Jury commented on Ito’s direct expression of his sense of social responsibility citing his work on “Home-for-All.”
Recently, Ito has also thought of his legacy, as apparent by the museum of architecture that bears his name on the small island of Omishima in the Seto Inland Sea. Also designed by Ito, the museum opened in 2011 and showcases his past projects as well as serving as a workshop for young architects. Two buildings comprise the complex, the main building “Steel Hut” and the nearby “Silver Hut,” which is a recreation of the architect’s former home in Tokyo, built in 1984.

>>
http://www.pritzkerprize.com/2013/biography

http://www.pritzkerprize.com/2013/jury-citation

http://www.pritzkerprize.com/2013/works