Toyo Ito. Sendai Mediatheque

Images of the Mediatheque have widely circulated in architectural media since 1995, when Toyo Ito's competition project revealed a new structural prototype (or archi-type) that expressed the will to incorporate the notions of mobility and fluidity into space and structure. Second in the series of Verb monographs, this book presents the process of design and construction of Ito's prototype during the six years between the building's initial design through to its completion in 2001. The Mediatheque aspires to integrate real and virtual worlds - or, in Ito's words, “the primitive body of natural flow and the virtual body of electronic flow”. Long after its completion, the Mediatheque is still evolving. An evolutionary building that combines the virtual and real into one design objective. Photos, drawings, and text.