Toyo Ito is a Japanese architect, seeking to go beyond the architecture of Modernism by rediscovering the relationship between architecture and nature and by bringing nature into architecture. In 2013, Ito won the Pritzker Architecture Prize – the Nobel Prize of architecture. The jury cites Ito as “creator of timeless buildings infusing his designs with a spiritual dimension and for the poetics that transcend all his works.” Recently, he received the Gold Medal from the International Union of Architects in 2017 and Richard J. Neutra Award for professional excellence in 2021.

After graduating from the Department of Architecture at the University of Tokyo, he began working at Kiyonori Kikutake & Associates. He founded his studio “Urban Robot” in 1971 in Tokyo, which is renamed Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects.

Ito’s representative works include a large number of successful public and private buildings across Japan and overseas such as the Sendai Mediatheque (2001), the Tama Art University Library, Hachioji Campus (2007), ‘Minna no Mori’ Gifu Media Cosmos (2015), Museo Internacional del Barroco (2016), and the National Taichung Theater (2016).

After the Tohoku Earthquake in 2011, he launched an initiative to create Homes-for-All, gathering places for disaster victims living in temporary housing units, and completed 16 of them. In response to the Kumamoto earthquakes in 2016, which occurred when he was the Commissioner of the Kumamoto Artpolis, he has overseen the building of 100 Homes-for-All.

In 2011, he established a private architectural school, Ito Juku, which focuses on the future of cities and architecture. Since 2012, he has been engaged in a variety of activities to revitalize the island of Omishima in Imabari, Ehime, where the Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture, Imabari is situated, with Ito Juku members and the local community.

Photo: Fujitsuka Mitsumasa