Japan 2: Sendai Mediatheque by Toyo Ito

[second in a three-part series]


The sleepy city of Sendai in northern Japan is relatively far from the major economic and technological centers of Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Kyoto. In the mid-nineties, the authorities decided a tech boost for the city was required, and launched an international competition for the Sendai Mediatheque. The winning design by Toyo Ito was completed in 1998 - it contains a performance area, public library with high-end technology facilities, two galleries and artist's studios.


Functional and structural organization of the building is through a series of steel-and-glass tubes of various sizes running vertically through the building. In addition to holding the flat plate floors, they house elevators, stairs, service ducts, and permit light into the centre of the building. They twist like the branches of a tree as they move up through the building, generating spaces and zones between them on each level.



This drawing (sorry it's so crappy) illustrates what I found most interesting about the building - if looked at purely in terms of structural efficiency, this drawing showing the steel members in the floor plates looks illogical, with redundant elements: the most efficient way to span the space is of course to use a column-grid system. Ito, however does not place structural efficiency at the top of his list of design prerogatives - structure is seen as something more pliable, with the goal of maximum functional efficiency superseding concerns such as structural legibility. This decision expresses a break with the design's chief historical Modernist predecessors - such as Le Corbusier's Dom-ino system of post and floorplate construction, or Mies Van Der Rohe's absolute space of supreme structural perspicuity. Both of these were direct, architectural manifestations of the prevailing early-twentieth century zeitgeist of mass-production. Ito, in a short essay about the building, railed against mass-production for ultimately producing uniform spaces and uniform architecture, a uniformity which could not accommodate the functional complexity required by architecture. To that end, he attempted, with unconventional structural systems and advanced construction techniques borrowed from the ship-building industry, to avoid the uniformity dictated by mass-production, while still making full use of technological advances.


We also visited the National Museum in Tokyo by Le Corbusier. Without getting too much into the design, it was apparent the building was quite far from satisfying functional demands, and had been modified extensively for acoustic, lighting, organizational, and fire code requirements, as well as suffering from a poorly considered additional building.



In the context of Modernist buildings, with their hierarchy of author - design - construction - use - end-user, the number of interventions made by the user after the completion of the building can be seen as a measure of its ability to accommodate functional requirements. In the case of the Le Corbusier building, a combination of organisational inflexibillity and changing requirements over a thirty-odd year period had resulted in circulation obstacles, didactic directional arrows, jarring material palettes, and general curatorial detritus ruining any architectural coherence the building originally possessed.

We see none of this attempt to reconcile design intent with actual utilitarian demands at Sendai. Granted, the building is far newer with less time elapsed between original and current requirements, but there is also a strong argument to be made that the flexible nature of the planning allowed by the relegation of structural concerns has lead to a basic improvement in the open-plan typological form.


This places the building, conceptually, in a timeline that can be said to begin roughly in the nineteenth century scientific and industrial revolution, a particularly Western point of view which sees all human output, be it cultural, scientific, artictic, technological, or otherwise, as a process of continuing improvement. The birth of modern science and the understanding of physical laws gave the first engineers the tools to build with steel and concrete, which then allowed architects to experiment with these building techniques and produce meaningful architecture with them. Ito's building is a further improvement on what is seen as incremental progress, tending continually towards, but never quite reaching, a perfect condition.

Cambodia: Ta Phrom

Picking photos out of the nearly 100 I took here was a cruel and unusual punishment. It really was beautiful.

Japan: Three Views of Time

1. Isé Shrine at the Forest of Jingu

This forest and the river running through it are considered are considered the holiest in Japan's native Shintoist religion. The bridge crossing it, and the many shrines and ancillary structures within the forest constitute the most revered site for Shintoists.

The main sanctuary building at Isé cannot be visited by pilgrims or others, or even photographed from the outside. These are some sneaky photos I really shouldn't have gotten away with - the first is the torii (sacred entry) leading to the gateway through the outer fence of the Goshóden (main sanctuary building). Here people stand, look over the fence at the main sanctuary building, and pray. I didn't realize, until a pilgrim stopped me, that I wasn't permitted to even take this photo - what I was actually trying to photograph wasn't the torii, but the tree to the left of the photo.

I thought it was interesting that, rather than cut down the tree, or locate the path slightly to the right, the tree is incorporated into the path. This harmonization of artificial with natural, manmade intervention as an extension of nature, is one of the defining characteristics of Isé.


This is a part of the main sanctuary building, as seen from the other side of the fence. This building, and the others within the sanctuary fence, are built in a style of architecture called yuiitsu shinmei zukuri, which is unique to Jingu. Derived from vernacular grain store architecture, it is considered the most purely 'japanese' building form in Japan, free from all external influences.


The is the alternate site of the main sanctuary. Every twenty years, each shrine within the holy forest is dismantled, with the building elements, artifacts and apparel redistributed to other sites around Japan. With timber from the surrounding forest, the shrines, torii, and ancillary structures are reconstructed on a site next to the old one over the course of two years. The entire ritual, known as the Shikinen Sengú, culminates with a ceremonial moving of the august mirror (symbol of the kami, or spirit of the shrine) to the new site. The small structure in the middle ground of this photo is small shrine to house the kami until the next iteration of the cycle, (the 62nd) in October 2013.

It is this notion of ritual which is key to understanding Isé. The functional origins of this tradition are rooted in a desire for permanence and continuity. Under threat from a foreign faith (Buddhism), the tenth Emperor and head of the religion, Suinin Tennó, instituted the shrines at Jingu and the cycle of reconstruction as a means of maintaining the current belief system. Through the regularity and repetition of a vast and complicated system of ceremonies to exact traditional specifications, a kind of stasis is maintained, leading to the purity required to maintain both a political and religious status quo.

This stasis requires that the entire phenomenon be rooted directly to a particular environment, that it be, literally, genus loci, spirit of place. A harmonization of artificial and natural is obtained physically through a homogeneity of material, and operationally through cyclic ritual.


Timber from the forest is used for every element of the building (structure, cladding, even roofing). Construction techniques become a celebration of wood, metal fixings are rejected in favour of a materially homogenous system of pegs maintain rigidity in the structure.


The regularity of ritual is used above all to root the tradition temporally in its context as the use of wood roots it physically. The cyclic character of the Shikinen Sengú makes it an extension of nature, aligns human activity with other natural cycles - daily, lunar, seasonal, generational, etc. The stasis implied by this repetition implies that a perfect, ideal, or natural condition has been attained, that merely needs to be maintained. A diagram for its temporal status might look like this: