Toyo ito biography of rory

The most striking feature of Tate Modern—the huge art museum in a converted power station on the south bank of the Thames, in London—is the Turbine Hall, a cathedral-like space five hundred feet long, seventy-five feet wide, and a hundred and fifteen feet tall. Each year, the Tate invites an artist to create a monumental piece specifically for the hall. When, a few years ago, this commission was given to Anish Kapoor, whose works include “Cloud Gate,” a hundred-and-ten-ton kidney-shaped stainless-steel sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park, he did something that artists don’t usually do: he hired a structural engineer.

The man he chose was Cecil Balmond, who is a trustee of Arup, an international engineering firm based in London. Arup has offices in thirty-seven countries, and its engineers are, at any moment, involved in several thousand large projects worldwide—a six-lane expressway in Singapore, a master plan for a new city in China, an automotive redesign in the United Kingdom, the long-awaited Second Avenue subway line in Manhattan. Balmond is sixty-four. He has a disarming, slightly gap-toothed smile and a trim gray chinstrap beard, which he uses as a pointing device and rhetorical aid. He dresses as casually as a literature professor, and when he thinks about something difficult he runs a hand over his head, the top of which is bald. He is a talented musician and, early in his career, considered leaving Arup to make his living as a classical guitarist.

Kapoor was used to working with full-time assistants, but he came to feel an unusual imaginative harmony with Balmond. “The traditional role of the engineer is to perform, so to speak, the ideas of the architect, or of the artist, or whatever,” Kapoor told me not long ago. “But Cecil and I decided, quite clearly, that we were going to put that aside and in

As one of the leading architects of Japan's increasingly highly-regarded architecture culture, Pritzker LaureateToyo Ito (born June 1, ) has defined his career by combining elements of minimalism with an embrace of technology, in a way that merges both traditional and contemporary elements of Japanese culture.

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Born in what is now Seoul when Korea was under Japanese rule, Ito's family moved to Japan itself when he was just two years old; he would eventually attend the University of Tokyo, where his prize-winning undergraduate thesis secured him a place in the office of Kiyonori Kikutake, a founder of Metabolism and one of the leading Japanese architects at the time.

Toyo Ito founded his own practice, then known as Urban Robot or "Urbot" in , changing its name to Toyo Ito & Associates in In the early years of his practice, many of his most recognized projects were private homes, including the home he designed for his sister, White U, and his own home the Silver Hut. Speaking about his work in the s, he once said that he "was seeking to erase conventional meaning from his works through minimalist tactics, developing lightness in architecture that resembles air and wind."

International recognition began to come in the s, and with it perhaps Ito's most important commission: designed between and , and completed in , the Sendai Mediatheque remains one of Ito's most notable works, with its most recognizable feature the 13 high-tech latticed columns which not only support the building (including in major earthquakes) but also provide clear routes for the many cables required to service the building's program.

In addition to the Pritzker Prize, Ito has also received the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Royal Gold Medal and the 22nd Praemium Imperiale.

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