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.