Sendai Mediatheque
Sendai Mediatheque: Toyo Ito
Albert Ferré, Tomoko Sakamoto
Actar Publishers, April 2003
Flexicover | Page Size inches | 240 pages | English | ISBN: 978-8495951038 | $19.95
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
Calling him a “creator of timeless buildings,” the Pritzker Jury further praised Ito for “infusing his designs with a spiritual dimension and for the poetics that transcend all his works.” Among those works, the Jury singled out his Sendai Mediatheque, whose innovative use of structural tubes “permitted new interior spatial qualities.” The book Sendai Mediatheque presents the process of design and construction of Ito’s prototype during the six years between the building’s initial design through to its completion in 2001. The Mediatheque aspires to integrate real and virtual worlds – or, in Ito’s words, “the primitive body of natural flow and the virtual body of electronic flow”. Long after its completion, the Mediatheque is still evolving as an evolutionary building that combines the virtual and real into one design objective.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
Earlier in the week I received an email from Actar Publishers that drew attention to the 20th anniversary of the Sendai Mediatheque, the innovative structure designed by Toyo Ito & Associates and engineered by Sasaki Structural Consultants. (That email was echoed in a Facebook post the same day.) The building was completed in August 2000 and opened to the public the following January. With its seaweed-like bundled-tube structure and open floor slabs between exterior glass facades, the building was unprecedented in 2000, and even more so when Ito won the competition for it in 1995. I included Sendai Mediatheque for the year 2000 in 100 Years, 100 Buildings, and I used this 2003 book from Actar as a primary source for researching the building. Seventeen years later, the book is still available from the publisher.
Sendai Mediatheque, the book, has a flexicover much like the Verb "boogazines" released by Actar the same decade. The back cover actually features the Verb logo above the word "monograph," making Sendai Mediatheque part of a series of Verb Monographs; others included Seattle Public Library by OMA/LMN, which I also have, and The Yokohama Project by FOA. I'm not sure if any more books were released in the series, but these are three of the most important buildings created after the Millennium, all worthy of book-length case studies. (Sendai Mediatheque was also documented in detail by GA Document and in the Case: Series, but those two titles are out of print and harder to come by, at least for a reasonable price.)
Actar's book on Ito's building is very thorough and very well organized. It is structured in three sections — Idea, Construction, Use — that span from the competition in 1995 to the months after the opening. The drawings and models of the former and the finished photography of the latter bracket the many photographs documenting the building's construction. Positioned along the edge of most spreads is a timeline that positions readers within the five-year process of the building's realization and within the book's 240 pages. An odd feature, though, is the orientation of the text and images clockwise 90 degrees from the norm, something not so readily apparent in the spreads below but very noticeable when reading the book. This orientation requires readers to put the book on a table or on their lap and open the pages away from them, rather than holding the book with their two hands. In and of itself this is not an issue, but combined with the flexicover, which has a tendency to want to close, it's a bit awkward (a lay-flat binding would have solved things). Nevertheless, this is a book any fan of Ito and Sendai Mediatheque should own.
