Japanese architect Toyo Ito awarded 2013 Pritzker
TOYO Ito, an architect who uses bravura engineering to achieve effortless-looking lyricism, was yesterday named the 2013 laureate of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize.
TheTokyo-based architect will receive the bronze medal and a $100,000 check at a May 29 ceremony at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.
The prize was established in 1979 by billionaire Jay A Pritzker, whofoundedHyattHotelsCorp, and his wife, Cindy.
Big international prizes like the Pritzker have often celebrated architects who need neither the money nor the attention.
In recent years the Pritzker juries have chosen transformative, but less-known talents, like last year’s winner, Wang Shu, who has resisted China’s wholesale obliteration of its traditional cityscapes.
Toyo Ito, 71, is no celebrity. His inviting, even voluptuous forms come from a painstaking attention to circumstances. He topped sober marble cubes in a funeral hall in Japan’s Gifu prefecture with an undulating roof that seems to dance.
“There’s an underlying discipline that allows him to be open, fresh and young in many ways,” said Ken Tadashi Oshima, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Wash- ington, who is a Japan specialist and has worked with Ito.
The architect’s best-known building is the Sendai Mediatheque (2000) in Japan’s Miyagi prefecture, a rectangle wrapped in transparent glass so passersby can see in. It anticipated how digital technologies would transform libraries. A broad open floor plan invites people to work and collaborate in new ways.
Working with structural engineer Mutsuro Sasaki, he supported the building with elegant latticework bundles of pipes that run inside tubes of glass. They gently tilt in different directions, an effect likened to swaying seaweed.