Abstract:
In a recent monograph on the architecture of Toyo Ito, eminent philosopher and architecture critic Koji Taki made use of a striking analogy – he described Ito’s Tod’s Omotesando Building (2004) as being as if “the entire volume were wrapped in a single sheet of paper” (Taki 2006: 9). The aesthetics of thinness and ephemerality have long been central to Ito’s work, and the image of paper is something Ito himself used early in his career. In an essay entitled The Thin Façade Ito described the façade of the one of his key projects from the 1970s, the PMT Building in Nagoya (1978), as being “like a curved sheet of paper” (Ito 1978a: 21). Some commentators have extended – perhaps speculatively – this notion of paper- like thinness in Ito’s architecture, noting a similarity in his work to an ancient Japanese drawing technique called okoshi-ezu, or “folding drawing”, that is little known in the West. In an essay on the work of David Chipperfield written in the early 1990s, Kenneth Frampton made a passing and rather cryptic reference to the use of two-dimensional planes in Ito’s architecture as an “aestheticized play on the okoshi-ezu tradition” (Frampton 1992: 11), and I too have previously noted similarities to okoshi-ezu in Ito’s more recent work (Barrie 2004).