Connecting with Physical and Virtual Waters

“There are two types of water that connect people to the world,” explained Pritzker Prize-winning architect Toyo Ito (aided by translator-journalist Noriko Takiguchi) to a global Zoom crowd attending the Architectural League’s final installment of its Current Work lecture series. Ito was joined by fellow Japanese architect and Harvard GSD professor Toshiko Mori, who introduced her colleague and moderated the Q&A session after the lecture.

“There is physical water, like that which has made up our bodies and the natural world forever,” continued Ito. “Today, we have a second, virtual water—we seek out rivers of data, information and experience, and flow with them wherever they may lead us.” Ito’s work could be described as a mediation between these two waters—conceptual yet comfortable; urban, yet organic in form. However, in the wake of the development that is literally skyrocketing around Tokyo in the lead up to the now-delayed 2020 Olympics, Ito questioned whether this second aqueous predisposition is good for humanity. In building taller and more comprehensive structures that, on a surface level, are meant to provide convenient avenues to virtual water, Japanese city dwellers have become “less expressive, detached, and live homogenized lives.”

In the years following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Ito, in his development of the Homes-for-All initiative, was reminded of the “indivisible connection the Japanese people have with wood.” He has been integrating this material (particularly CLT) in several of his recent projects (he discussed the New National Stadium Japan Proposal, Mito Civic Center, Academic Building South in Nanyang Technological University, Minna no Mori Gifu Media Cosmos, and the National Taichung Theater), in an attempt to strike a graceful balance of physical and virtual waters in urban environments. “The nature of architecture is outmoded in today’s world; it tries to connect the physical water within human beings to the physical water surrounding them. But trying to forge this connection, this is my continued purpose in being an architect.”