Sendai Mediatheque: Toyo Ito [PDF]

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SENDAI MEDIATHEQUE Toyo Ito



Ron Witte



Toyo Ito, Sendai Mediatheque, 2001.*



The Companions to the History of Architecture, Volume IV, Twentieth-Century Architecture. Edited by David Leatherbarrow and Alexander Eisenschmidt. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



THE FIFTH PLAN In recent architecture a new type of plan has been afoot. It has been stealing into architecture for a decade or two, perhaps longer, alternately announcing and obscuring its arrival via the paroxysms that come with a long gestation. Does this plan signal a significant architectural turn? It is hard to say, for as yet it is more of a twinkle in its parents’ eye than an established progeny, insinuating its potential without yet assuring us of its longevity, or even its vivacity. Nonetheless, this plan has made it far enough along an accelerating arc to make it worth looking at its origins, its manifestations, and (most importantly) its promises. Arriving at the tail end of a century’s evolution, this new plan descends from four antecedents: the pre-modern plan (through the nineteenth century: line-‘em-upjust-so); the modern plan (early twentieth century: give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death); the postmodern plan (1960s/1970s/1980s: we-used-to-do-it-like-this-plus-je-ne-saisquoi); and the sequel-modern plan (from the 1980s through the turn of the twenty-first century: modernity-non-chalant). On the heels of these four plan iterations, this new plan arrives as a fifth generation – a fifth plan. While each of the four preceding plan types had tendencies toward selfdefinition – the architects of each self-consciously, and usually zealously, distinguished “their” particular plan predilections from any antecedents – the fifth plan appears without Oedipal angst. It uses, discards, adapts, and mixes plan attributes from the entire genome of the preceding century. It unflinchingly cross-fertilizes “free,” “open,” “dense,” “axial,” “figured,” “serial,” “serendipitous,” “functional,” or other techniques, employing the seemingly hardened ideologies of its ancestors in surprisingly malleable ways. Free-plan spanning systems are filled with highdensity programs. Exuberant form runs alongside ultra-rational technological organizations. Volumes are surfaces and surfaces are volumes. The fifth plan is not only comfortable in its skin, it revels in its mongrel lineage. Without looking like a mutt (at least on its better days), the fifth plan is indebted to the full and ostensibly disparate spectrum of its pedigree. Where can this new plan be found? Differing strains of it appear in a range of contemporary practices including those of Michael Maltzan (Pittman Dowell House, Malibu Beach House), FANStudio (Fat Flat), Johnston Marklee (View House), Mansilla & Tuñón (MUSAC), Sou Fujimoto (Musashino Library, Children’s Psychiatric Center), Natkevicius & Partners (Family House), Herzog & de Meuron (Cottbus Library), SANAA (IIT Student Center, Toledo Glass Museum), OMA (Casa de Musica, Zeebrugge Ferry Terminal, National Art Museum of China), and, of course, Toyo Ito (Sendai Mediatheque, U House). No single practice lays claim (or, for that matter, is trying to lay claim) to this new plan type, and none of them can be said to deploy it consistently. Still, when



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scanning these projects an increasingly forceful exhibition of evolved plan thinking comes into focus. The fifth plan’s presence might be found in a single building, in a part of a building, across a string of projects produced by a particular practice, or in a cross section of work by many architects. It may well be that this plan’s lack of singular origin or ownership is what allows it to appear in so many different architectural contexts: across scales of work, types of programs, geographies, practices, economies, and social worlds.



What Is The Fifth Plan? The fifth plan is compound, a fact that tints all other definitions that might be ascribed to it. As will be elaborated below, the fifth plan’s propensity to combine rather than distill is especially true regarding its tethering of program to form. Without a doubt, the fifth plan’s breadth-mandate is at least in part an echo of today’s de rigueur rejection of any form of cultural singularity. But the fifth plan moves well beyond representing multiplicity. Already half a century ago, with the introduction of collage, juxtaposition, and complexity, Venturi and others let us know that modernism’s singular definitions of architecture had run their course, opening the floodgates of architectural diversification. The fifth plan is only that much more multiple. And yet its multiplicity is of a resolutely synthetic sort. It is often impossible to discern where free-plan ends and figure begins in these new plans, or what is primary and what is secondary, or even where they sit in relation to commodity, firmness, and delight. The fifth plan’s contribution to contemporary architecture lies not in its validation of ever more heterogeneity but rather in the unified condensate that emerges when these several spatial states are brought together. In an almost alchemical sleight of hand, the fifth plan’s mash-up of origins produces a coherent organization of parts that sidesteps any indexing of difference without becoming singular. With this alchemy of paradigms humming in the background, the fifth plan’s parts and their interactions can be collected under a set of plan traits: viscosity, cropping, and susceptibility. While these traits are broad and regularly overlap one another, they are nonetheless a helpful set of lenses through which to look at the contemporary plan. In what follows, each of these fifth plan traits will be discussed across two threads. The first will lay out kinships: what are the primary inheritances of the fifth plan? The second will discuss new manifestations: where are particular techniques present in the contemporary plan and what are the implications of these techniques? This structure is meant to suggest that while the fifth plan is new, its newness does not depend on distinguishing itself from what came before. The fifth plan’s newness arises from the last century’s many sustenances now coalescing into plan-based configurations that are, in toto, unfamiliar.



4 The Present Generation The examples below include, for the most part, versions of all of the traits above (small scale work – houses – present these characteristics in a different way simply because of their size). These traits are not yet capable of defining a fifth plan handbook, though they might be seen as a manual in the making. Together, they are meant to identify organizational and formal strains circulating in plans today, to highlight them at times and, more ambitiously, to advance their combined possibilities for those interested in the contemporary plan. These labels are likely to evolve and, in fact, should evolve … their purpose here is more like that of iodine in a CAT scan than pillar in a paradigm.



Viscosity Over the last hundred years, architecture has tended toward one or the other extreme: plan openness or plan definition. In Houston, for example, this polarization plays out in two museum buildings across the street from one another: Mies van der Rohe’s posthumously completed Brown Pavilion (1974) and Rafael Moneo’s Beck Building (2000), both built for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). In the former, walls, structure, circulation, and optical control all cede to boundless openness and the immanent optimism attending its universalist ambitions. In the latter, a matrix of rooms divides space into discreet bites of discernible museum inventory, invoking the choreographed order of John Soane’s Bank of England (1788–1827). Curiously, the MFAH buildings are both late versions of their respective sensibilities. Mies’ building mirrors work that he had been doing since at least the mid-1950s and Moneo’s emanates from discourses running through architecture as early as the 1960s. The late appearance of exclusively open or defined approaches in these projects exposes the tenaciousness of the debate. Among architects, this debate has a tendency to be framed in unusually profound (even moral) terms, obliging us to align our sympathies and leaving us with little middle ground. There are those who side with flexibility, the virtues of technologies, and the seeming socio-political liberties of the free plan. And there are those who align with functional discretion, the rhetorical value of rooms, and the stabilizing role that knowing “this is a space in which X will happen” can bring to a social organization. The gap between openness and definition disappears in the fifth plan. That which had been open is less open, and that which had been defined is less definitive, resulting in the delineations of openness and definition being pushed toward one another. One of the more extraordinary examples of this squeezing together of open and defined occurs in Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque (2001), most obviously in the seventh floor plan. There is no “free” space and there is no “determined” space in this plan. The large figure of this plan’s central space – an undulating wall circumscribing a set of interior rooms and creating a ring of space at the plan’s edges – is large and idiosyncratic enough to dissolve as it encounters the varied columns of the



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plan. The columns are expanded across their diameters, enlarging their technical/ structural presence and, in so doing, biasing the space around them in ways that a simple point column never could. The interaction of the large figure with the columns produces local relationships – program pockets that hover among the collusions of the large figure, columns, furniture, and building perimeter. At Sendai, there is only something akin to viscous space, thick with the interactions of walls, structure, program, and circulation. Moving across the plan, these viscosities are constantly changing; the central office area opens up and closes down, but never in an entirely consummated way. The perimeter “doughnut” of program narrows, widens, and re-narrows again, its dimensional heavings shaping program into greater and lesser definitions. The line that expands and constricts this doughnut is at times autonomous – defining the large figure – and at other times deferential, entering a tighter orbit with the columns. This is a line, a single line, with multiple loyalties: to its exterior and its interior, to its overall and local organizational roles, and to its delineation of difference and connectedness. Many of the spaces in this plan (especially those in the corners) are capable of changing their own definition-states, pulsating between semi-open and semi-closed. The Domino plan is alive and well in the Mediatheque, but it is now captured in a gelatinous spatial system that slows down the dynamics of its larger organizational umbrella and increases the momentum of the subsets of space that live under that umbrella. A different version of the fifth plan’s viscosity occurs in Kazuyo Sejima’s entry for the IIT Student Center competition. In this non-winning scheme, Sejima confronted Miesian universal space by replicating that very space with her own big box and then relentlessly over-packing that box with program. Imagine, for a moment, Mies’ Neue Nationalgalerie filled to the brim with a mini-mall, albeit a mini-mall saturated with the material/technological/aesthetic affections that an architect like Sejima would of course lavish upon Mies. The project’s aformality no doubt halted it at the starting gate vis-à-vis the competition (the scheme was presented in a set of ink line drawings so delicate that it read as little more than a vaporous cloud of hair-like marks hovering over paper). The Sejima IIT proposal is, nonetheless, a radical repackaging of Mies’ universalism and Koolhaas’ congestion in a single architectural prism, producing fifth plan viscosity through extreme functional compactness. New viscosities have risen out of our pursuit of closer program-form relationships. With so much airtime given over to arguing the merits of program or form in recent years, the mere fact of these two interests coinciding marks an evolution in plan thinking. Beyond this realignment, however, the program-form merger has given us a means of being unabashedly geometric and willfully programmatic, which is to say these projects suggest a shift away from our recent (over)indulgences of indeterminacy and flexibility as architectural paradigms. The merger of form and program leads directly to the thickening of relationships and, what is more, directly to an explicit declaration of organizational subjectivity. New



6 The Present Generation viscosities are filled with programmatic densities and intensifications, common turf over recent decades. But the fifth plan inscribes in this mix the force of deliberateness, an open assertion concerning a plan’s artifice (its partiality) and a chance to say “this isn’t all worlds; this is a world that I think is better.”



Cropping Over the last century, countless black lines have been laid down on countless sheets of white paper with the sole purpose of laying claim to what an architectural perimeter should do. These lines at times focus on the relationship between interior and exterior. At other times they articulate the form of a building or its functional ethos. Regardless of what we intend when we draw them, these lines have been enmeshed in our conception of the plan with one of two inevitable outcomes: a perimeter that is definite (high contrast) or a perimeter that is indefinite (low contrast). As endgames, high and low contrast perimeters depend on how one chooses to inscribe form and program relative to one another. This choice represents a fork in the road for architects: either “architecture = stabilizing vis-à-vis life” or “architecture = vulnerable vis-à-vis life.” This choice is, to say the least, loaded. It is the undercurrent running beneath many of our ideological directives and, as such, is how we edit (bias) architecture’s otherwise too-expansive cultural resonances in directions that we “believe in.” One might see form and program as concentric (i.e. Frank Gehry’s shrink-wrapped EMR Communication and Technology Center) or one might see them as cross-grained (i.e. Mies van der Rohe’s pin-wheeling Brick Country House). Concentric sensibilities produce high contrast perimeters and cross-grained sensibilities produce low contrast perimeters. Curiously, making this decision has little to do with deciding to “be formalist” or “be functionalist” – Gehry’s UTS Business School is cross-grained at times and Mies’ latter career work (Farnsworth House, Crown Hall, etc.) is decidedly concentric. What this decision does do is inscribe a reciprocal relationship between form and program in the way that we access architecture. A concentric form/program sensibility leads us to “see” form and “intuit” program while a cross-grained form/program sensibility directs us to “see” program and “intuit” form. Our penchant for high or low contrast decisiveness along architecture’s outer boundaries has disappeared. This change is not about indecisiveness. Neither is it about one or the other boundary types having won the war. In fact, any number of recent projects can be said to depend on a calculated cohabitation of these traits. These projects include Herzog & de Meuron’s Cottbus Library, Michael Maltzan’s unbuilt Malibu Beach House, Gintautas Natkevicius’ Family House in Birstonas, SANAA’s Kanazawa Museum, and Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque as well as his Tama Art University Library, among others.



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Each of these projects crops plan relations into new sub-states, using the overlay of a knife-like line to compress some proximities while atomizing others. Cropping amplifies unevenness in these plans, which is to say cropping confronts head-on any pretense of modern universality. This is particularly curious in Ito’s Mediatheque as the building has an obvious debt to Corbusier’s Dom-ino system with its grounding in the evenness of a column-field. As with the Dom-ino, and regardless of their exaggerated size, the Mediatheque’s columns instill consistency across the building’s seven floors; their slight variations are alone unable to produce significant affectations of each plate’s organization. But the lines that Ito introduces on each level – the walls and scrims that slice across and lasso subsets of column-spotted space – convert each floor into its own biased world. The ground floor’s “open square” is formed with the sharpest of lines…one that is little more than a virtual indicator of this space’s status as a programmatic no-man’s land. On the second floor, an udder-shaped line – part solid wall, part low counter – extracts the north-west corner of the building into its own state, bundling staff areas, service rooms, a “talking room,” and the children’s reading area into an autonomous program block. On the third floor, a lone linear stroke clips the library offices out of the overall plate. On the seventh floor described above, a single meandering line completes a solitary figure in the plate’s interior, bounding a dense programmatic mass that hovers in the ether of the surrounding perimeter. On each floor, a seemingly flippant line is etched among the columns so as to profoundly prejudice the free-plan starting point of these plates. Herzog & de Meuron’s Cottbus Library also depends on cropping, though here the technique plays out primarily on the building’s perimeter in contrast to the Mediatheque’s use of cropping as an exclusively interior technique. Cottbus holds a serialized interior organization – a modernist organization based on repetition, alignment with the structural grid, a field matrix – that is bluntly sheared by the undulations of the building envelope. While different in other regards, the Kanazawa Museum by SANAA uses a similar perimeter-focused technique, its field of cells and corridors clipped by its cylindrical face. The most visible transformation in the edges of these plans is that of the change from an offset or indexed interior to a shorn interior-envelope relationship. If graphic shearing is the obvious delight of these plans (and is also what makes them subject to too-facile critiques falling under the heading of “gratuitous geometry damnation”), their organizational rewards are more nuanced. The incongruous relationship of a perimeter to its interior catalyzes a minor wilderness at their outer edges. “Minor” here is meant to differentiate these edges from the wholesale (whole plan) wilderness of projects such as those of the Bürolandschaft species … minor means local, not total. Here, in fact, cropping depends on a systematic organization of interior space with enough momentum to let its truncation be legible. Put another way, fifth plan cropping exploits the systematic to momentarily suspend that same system’s certainties. On a particularly hubris-filled day, one could



8 The Present Generation make the case that cropping, with its interior efficiencies meeting minor wildernesses, is a means by which architects can, at long last, stop the absurd swingings of the rational/liberatory pendulum, swingings that have produced some of architecture’s most caricaturable (if not always comic) moments over the last one hundred years. Architecture’s perimeter has long been a flashpoint for invention and critique – think of the discourses surrounding architecture’s qualifiers: object/anti-object, public/private, form/function, inside/outside. The fifth plan introduces cropping as a way of perching these pairings on the same, single, thin line, invoking both, only to then flicker between them at breakneck speed. Is Kanazawa an object? Of course it is – its circle is more perfect than anything Ledoux could have imagined. Is Kanazawa an anti-object? Absolutely – its inner workings are ruthlessly amputated by the blade of its outer edge. Cropping’s shotgun wedding of form and program does nothing to soothe their irreconcilable differences; on the contrary, it bluntly exploits their agitating exchanges to redefine architecture’s edge, opening up a new field of relations among architecture’s parts: its exterior receptions, its internal organizations, and its transitions between the two.



Susceptibility It would be easy to write a history of architecture organized around plan modulation types, with chapter headings including “axis,” “grid,” “symmetry,” “repetition,” “field,” “figure,” “system,” “proportion,” seriality,” “centralization,” “rhythm,” and so on. Perhaps a few recent experiments might make it in, at least into the appendix: “collage,” “index,” “lattice”; there are no doubt others. Until perhaps 50 years ago these were the spatial mechanisms for giving architecture “order,” a way of organizing architecture’s parts and, more broadly, of civilizing or at least explaining an unruly world. Order was our means of articulating and projecting our ambitions: an axis will create importance; a field will be democratic; a grid will contain the universe. Across the history of architecture, modulation (a technique) and order (an idea) have had a remarkably intimate, quasi-synonymous relationship, like twins with their own indecipherable language. And yet, the disappearance of order from our lexicon already a half century ago has hardly diminished our use of modulation. How can this be? How can architecture’s “Dead Ringers” – modulation and order – suddenly find themselves cut apart? Once a twin, always a twin. Modulation and order have not now, and have not ever, been cut apart. Transformations in architecture’s order-modulation relationship can be placed into the five categories sketched out at the beginning of this chapter: pre-modern: modulation supports order (Garnier’s Paris Opera); modern: modulation establishes new order (Mies’ New National Gallery); postmodern: modulation has a fistfight with order (Venturi’s Hanna Venturi House); sequel-



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modern: modulation and order take a time-out (OMA’s Netherlands Architecture Institute); fifth plan: modulation makes order susceptible. In short, modulation and order have never been far apart but they have regularly changed their posture relative to each other. Their perceived estrangement appears with postmodernism, when modulation and order take up adversarial positions, producing a surfeit of anti-hegemony, anti-total, anti-object, anti-you-name-it architectures. In fact, postmodernism’s adversarial repositioning of modulation and order allowed us to conduct countless fruitful architectural experiments leading to a plethora of alternative-orders in architecture, all the while requiring us to mutter the second part of that hyphenated phrase – “orders” – under our breath to avoid persecution. The fifth plan establishes another new posture in the order-modulation sequence of relationships: a modulated order whose aim is susceptibility, not firmness. This posture amounts to, on the one hand, a resurrection of order as a positive attribute and, on the other, a deployment of that order in a way that runs entirely contrary to its legacy as a civilizing/stabilizing agent. In the fifth plan, order is always there but always volatile, unpredictable, and sometimes woolly. It is also legible, coherent, and even reasonable. The most important attribute of this new susceptibility is the ability of contemporary modulating systems to generate relationships that exceed their systemic terms (in contrast to modern or classical systems that work diligently to reinforce their systemic underpinnings). The Mediatheque’s 13 columns are arrayed across a four-by-three near-grid, with a single exceptional column intruding on its southernmost near-grid column line. This grid’s wobbliness – it teeters it in the X, Y, and Z directions – produces extreme polarizations in what we have come to expect from modulation, with comparably extreme implications for what we intend as order. On a spatial level, the inebriations of these columns heighten their independence from one another, making each of them susceptible to absorption into local circumstances. They are variously enmeshed in rooms (floors two, three, and seven), border markers (floors one, three, five, and six), and free agents (floors two, three, and four). As conduits of gravity, their intoxications are kept in check by the physics of plate tectonics – the span of Matsuro Sasaki’s extraordinary webbed floor system was constrained by a 40 cm depth requirement. Programmatically, in other words, the soft modulation of these columns allows their systemic role to entirely dissolve while technically these same modulations unload an almost heroic structural obligation onto the spanning and design requirements of the webbed floor system. The former is a system that produces its own disappearance and the latter is a system that incites an extreme rationality elsewhere. And, almost mystically, the two systems are one and the same, a single set of wobbly columns. Mansilla & Tuñón’s MUSAC building announces an alternate version of a modulating system that consumes itself. MUSAC is astonishingly consistent in its unit articulations, it is a thick-line plan, not field-of-dots plan, made up of either four-sided or six-sided trapezoids, depending on how one chooses to read them.



10 The Present Generation The lucidity of the overall plan comes from the confidence with which these trapezoids are arrayed. They are relentless and they are modern. Until: 1) one looks at their effect on the overall perimeter, with its indiscernible profile; 2) each unit is examined for consistency only to find that there is none; and 3) unit-to-unit (and, in turn, room-to-room) aggregations are highlighted to expose a series of latent programmatic and circulation hierarchies superseding all of the democratizing rhetoric that we expect to run alongside such unitary organizations (compare this to, for example, the plan of Herman Hertzberger’s Office Beheer building, wherein the gaps and the connector portals between cells assure that the primary reading of these cells will always be individual, not aggregate). “Until” is a critique, a way of Mansilla & Tuñón declaring that theirs is not, in fact, a modern building. Beyond critique, the conclusion of “until” in the MUSAC plan lies in its suspension, not negation, of modulation. In the abstract terms of geometry, every cell in this plan remains a cell. In the application of walls, doors, and materials to those geometries no two cells are alike. Walls stand alone, pair up into chevrons, or make long strings of ziggy-zaggies; they construct perimeters in space or serve as islands around which one moves; they change from solid to open; they aggregate into larger areas or subdivide into smaller rooms. At the same time, no matter what, all of this difference is held in place by an uncompromising geometric system. The architects’ affections appear to run in opposing directions at MUSAC: heterogeneity and the disciplining of space. The turning point in this plan and others of its ilk is that modulation and heterogeneity are not opposed, but in fact have a complementary and catalytic relationship to one another. The success of the MUSAC plan is measured by the ease with which one can place a finger anywhere on its extents and ask “field or cell?,” “unit or unique?,” “edge or center?,” and not be able to answer. The fifth plan has removed the pejorative tone that has hung over order for 50 years. It has done this not as a sentimental lamenting of order’s absence but by rethinking order’s reason for being. Order, what we (as classicists or modernists) used to depend on to get us through the day, and what we (during our aftermodern self-flagellations) then propped up as the straw man, has of late become a means of designating where and how architecture can and cannot enforce its rule-sets. Order has entered a new phase as the carrier of susceptibility, the bearer of architecture’s openness and vulnerability.



Some Last Fifth Plan Thoughts We have been staring at architecture through our Rhino viewports for some time now, beguiled by the ease with which we can whirl and twirl our way through and among objects. After years of volumetric and surface-invested investigations, a number of architects have turned their attention to the incisive conceptual role that plans play in architecture’s evolution. This is not a move “away from the digital,” or “toward a lost tradition.” It is the opening up of a new line of inquiry: important



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transformations in our thinking about architecture are taking place and many of those changes will find their greatest potential among the marks that make up plans. Viscosities, croppings, and susceptibilities may or may not be the headers under which the fifth plan will continue to evolve. Nonetheless, regardless of how these labels might be applied, their net effect is to illuminate a series of recent speculations leading to new conceptualizations of architecture. Nothing is more evident in the fifth plan than the near total collapse of form and program into one another. These new architectures suggest that architecture has moved beyond arguments based on exclusive extractions from the Vitruvian triad: “It’s about commodity!” “It’s about firmness!” “It’s about delight!” Form and program are only slightly offset Venn-diagram zones in these experiments, with technology acting as a silent partner. Their nearly concentric state makes it essentially impossible to discern formal acts/results and programmatic acts/results from one another. And it gives the fifth plan a synthetic timbre long absent, even ideologically opposed, for a very long time. One might imagine that, some time from now, the fifth plan may enable architecture to appear whole again, as a reverberating semblance of singularity.



Notes * Reproduced with permission from Toyo Ito.