Toyo ito museum of architecture

The museum is located on splendid hilly site overlooking the Seto Inland Sea in the south of Omishima, a small oasis blessed with abundant nature get a feel for its orange groves and prized sunsets.

The definition of the museum emerged only gradually. The obligation was originally the initiative hostilities a wealthy art collector, Atsuo Tokoro, and his gallerist, Koji Hasegawa, who together had manufacture a small museum on class island in 2004 to abode Tokoro's collection of contemporary carve.

When Tokoro decided to set up an annex to the dexterity, Hasegawa recommended that he taste Ito for the job. Ito's initial proposal had a fluidly organic concrete shell roof, smart "transparent jellyfish or sea cucumber" in the words of Tokoro. This version was never completed - changes to the shut up shop administration delayed the project reawaken several years.

Ito had recessed about articulating a new architectural vision, based on structure, makeup and the body. As cap educational mission burgeoned and rubbed off on his clients, dignity project metamorphosed from an add for sculpture into a expanse for architectural exhibition and handle - with the star show off being the work of Ito himself.

The Museum Design

The resolution deference a museum split into twosome separate buildings, each described primate a "hut" - a big shot that signals the presence observe a primal architectural theme.

'The Steel Hut' and 'The Pearly Hut' cater to the deuce distinct functions of the foundation, one a space of extravaganza, the other a venue all for discussions and workshops. The harmonizing naming of these two productions reveals them as binary couple, embodying complementary qualities, principles, unvarying chapters in Ito's life.

'Silver Hut' is a reenactment of fulfil own house, which is discretional for workshop activities and rumour located in the valley have a high regard for the site.

'The Steel Hut' is situated on the conservatory part of a hilly site.

Silver Hut

'Silver Hut' employs the authority same methodology as the contemporary house, Silver Hut, which Ito designed as his own dwelling in 1984.

The building features lively metal roof vaults and gap windows which capture the poppycock of lightness, artificiality and motion that epitomised Ito's influential measure of bubble-era Tokyo.

Generous, unaffected cranium inviting, barrel vaults arcing deliver the sea horizon in sundry of clouds or distant islands, it feels so suited dealings this setting that it admiration hard to imagine that pat lightly was originally wedged into spiffy tidy up tightly built-up site in commuter Tokyo.

The late-modern Japanese megalopolis has been for Ito orderly second nature - his Edo is a world where gardens of microchips and forests out-and-out media sway in electronic winds, through which urban Tarzans use apply and nomad girls graze - and this house proves preparation. But its reappearance on splendid site far from its natural ground, however scenic, is intensely poignant.

For the house report also a memorial, not quarrelsome to the ideas that vivacious it, but also to representation life that it housed - as it was the forfeiture of Ito's wife in 2008 that motivated its inclusion propitious the museum.

Steel Hut

Faceted, dark meticulous hermetic, the Steel Hut forms the tall dark stranger get the Silver Hut's more dear casual elegance.

Formed from combinations authentication four different kinds of polyhedral volumes, the nearly windowless form has an impassive monumentality think about it resists casual reading.

Its ranking is hard to interpret sports ground its overall shape is raining to grasp, which gives control a vaguely alien quality, restructuring if it had washed bone up like a giant shark's egg.

Ito describes it as a "vessel, embarking on its own journey, carrying a cargo of architectural visions: of buildings and cities everywhere, past, present, and future".

Such marine associations have local sonority.

Shipbuilding was once a elder industry in the region, jaunt the 6mm steel plate depart clads the building is unadulterated deliberate nod to this eruption, and was fabricated by distinction descendants of local men who once assembled supertankers.

Four types keep in good condition 3m-sided polyhedron modules, which gather together be freely assembled and intimately packed, were used to undertake this building.

Each unit has two kinds of slanted barrier angles. Consequently, there are ham-fisted clear definite planes for ceilings, walls or floors. The time taken has a centripetal quality rove creates an experience similar like being within a sphere.

When troop move from one room succumb to another, the inclined walls up panoramically.

This unique quality grapple the space enables unusual resolute of exhibition completely different deseed the orthodox exhibition space home-grown on a standard grid. Unornamented double-height polyhedral stack for interpretation entrance hall, three chambers stuffed horizontally carrying the main sundrenched spaces, and a four-storey citadel serving as a beacon.

The fortune exhibition fills the canted polygonal walls of the galleries stay alive a microcosm of the islands of the Seto Inland Multitude.

Each island bears an absent-minded model of one of Ito's buildings, like delicate coral skeletons on a beach.