Architect Toyo Ito.
Image: Yoshiaki Tsutsui
Toyo Ito will be awarded architecture’s highest international accolade for 2013, the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The seventy-one-year-old will receive his award in a ceremony on 29 May at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Massachusetts – a centre designed by I. M. Pei, also a winner (in 1983) of the Pritzker Prize.
Toyo Ito is the sixth Japanese architect to reveive a Pritzker Prize, after the late Kenzo Tange (1987), Fumihiko Maki (1993), Tadao Ando (1995), and the team of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (2010). Among his numerous awards, Ito holds the Royal Gold Medal (2006) from the 2006 Royal Institute of British Architects, and the Golden Lion (2002) for Lifetime Achievement for the 8th Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition.
After graduating in architecture from Tokyo University in 1965, Ito began working with Kiyonori Kikutake & Associates before starting his own practice, Urban Robot (Urbot), in 1971. In 1979 he changed its name to the more serious Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects.
1975–76: White U (house) Nakano-ku, Tokyo, Japan, designed for Toyo Ito’s sister.
Image: Koji Taki
Most of Ito’s early works are private residences, including the 1976 White U house he designed for his sister. It was the unusal serene geometry and monastic materiality of this project that brought attention to the young Ito’s work. Through much of the 1980s he pursued minimalist tactics to shun convention, and in the process developed a lightness of architectural touch rarely matched, particularly in concrete – his material of choice.
In its citation, the 2013 Pritzker jury called Ito a creator of timeless buildings, and praised him for “infusing his designs with a spiritual dimension and for the poetics that transcend all his works.” The jury further commented: “Creating outstanding architecture for more than 40 years, he has successfully undertaken libraries, houses, parks, theatres, shops, office buildings and pavilions, each time seeking to extend the possibilities of architecture. A professional of unique talent, he is dedicated to the process of discovery that comes from seeing the opportunities that lie in each commission and each site.”
In response, Ito observed: “Architecture is bound by various social constraints. I have been designing architecture bearing in mind that it would be possible to realize more comfortable spaces if we are freed from all the restrictions even for a little bit. However, when one building is completed, I become painfully aware of my own inadequacy, and it turns into energy to challenge the next project. Probably this process must keep repeating itself in the future. Therefore, I will never fix my architectural style and never be satisfied with my works.”
He may not be satisfied, but he is in good company in the pantheon of Pritzker laureates, beginning with the American architect Philip Johnson, the first to be awarded, in 1979, to the most recent, Wang Shu (awarded in 2012) of the People’s Republic of China. The late Jay A. Pritzker and his wife Cindy establshed the annual Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979 to honour a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, and who has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture. Laureates receive a US$100,000 grant and a bronze medallion. The Pritzker Architecture Prize is sponsored by The Hyatt Foundation.
Toyo Ito’s work, and that of other venerable Japanese architects, is the subject of an upcoming Sydney exhibition, Parallel Nippon Contemporary Japanese Architecture 1996–2006, open at the Japan Foundation Gallery in Sydney from 2 April to 1 May 2013.
See a gallery of Toyo Ito’s projects, and the full jury citation here.
