Layered Media - architectural structure, Sendai, Japan

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2001 by Michael Webb

From modest origins as a cultural centre and library in a provincial town, Toyo Ito's Sendai Mediatheque celebrates and displays its different activities and inventive structure in a dramatic urban shop window.

Sendai is a provincial capital, about 300km north of Tokyo, which was levelled in the Second World War and rebuilt on a spacious grid plan. In 1995, a new mayor decided that this prosperous modern city needed a more appropriate civic symbol than the ruins of its seventeenth-century castle, and invited Arata Isozaki to chair an expert jury to choose a dynamic design for a new arts centre.

Toyo Ito won that competition with a concept that was as audacious as the Pompidou Centre, though smaller and less assertive. Where Rogers and Piano flexed their muscles on the exterior, creating a heroic monument to the Machine Age, Ito proposed a transparent block whose supports would be wrapped in glass and dematerialized. Seven steel floor decks were stacked on 13 hollow columns composed of welded steel tubes. Schematically, it was an updated version of traditional Japanese post and beam construction with movable divisions and permeable boundaries.

Metaphors inspired the structure. Ito thought of the enclosed space as liquid, likened the columns to strands of seaweed drifting through an aquarium, and created sketches of ethereal delicacy. Like the temporary structures that launched his practice, and his computer-synthesized electrographic display in the 1991 Visions of Japan exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (AR November 1991), the Mediatheque was intended to express the fluid dynamics of the modern city in which light and movement are layered atop its physical structure and vibrate around vortexes of energy. For Ito, this was to be a bridge between real and conceptual, a physical embodiment of the electronic labyrinth which many now inhabit--especially the young in Japan.

Two contradictions emerged at the outset. The programme developed to fit into Ito's container fell far short of his vision. Sendai is a conservative city, and librarians anxious to accommodate a growing book collection and local artists seeking display space for academic paintings had no enthusiasm for open plans or virtual reality. Disagreement began the day after the competition winner was announced. The columns had to be beefed up to meet Japan's tough seismic code, and the challenge for structural engineer Mutsuro Sasaki was to retain the poetry while satisfying practical necessities.

Against all odds, much of Ito's concept has survived six years of impassioned debate, and the need for a structure (partly fabricated and welded by shipbuilders) that is more like an ocean liner than an aquarium. From the broad boulevard to the south, it appears as a shimmering rectangle of glass, etched with dots and dashes that animate the double-glazed skin and reduce glare, extending beyond the floor planes. Inside, a forest of canted white tubes (recalling the branches of the zelkova trees that run down the middle of the street), extends through the roof to support a gridded canopy.

At night, the south facade disappears. Only the skeletal structure is visible, animated by a blaze of ceiling lights and tiny accents of colour from furnishings set close to the glass. Though little of the building's activity is apparent above the ground floor, varied ceiling heights and the alternation of transparent, translucent and opaque surfaces on the other three sides of the block hint at its diversity of content. The Mediatheque combats the blandness and visual pollution of a Japanese city (a pachinko parlour formerly occupied the site) by staying cool and enigmatic. Even the graphics, stencilled onto the glass, are reticent. The spacious foyer, shop, and cafe that wrap around an enclosed gallery and service areas in the north-west quadrant reveal the essence of the plan. Four symmetrically-placed corner columns of 240mm diameter tubing carry much of the load and provide the necessary seismic bracing. Nine columns of 160mm diameter tubes are scattered in between; five are straight and contain lifts, the rest are crooked and carry ducts. The hollow columns pull down light from above, and most are clad in glass, adding a further layer of gauzy reflections to those in the polished marble floor and dematerializing the exposed structure. A shiny red plastic reception desk sinuously wraps around one column like a seductive swirl of lipstick, and similar extruded forms in yellow and white anchor the bar and bookshop.

To understand the building's section, take a lift to the top floor. From the glass cab you can see how floor planes have been sliced through, revealing the structural sandwich of steel plates topped with concrete. On a non-stop ascent, the ride gives a fleeting glimpse of each distinctive floor succeeding the next, as though snorkelling up the side of a coral reef. Here, Ito's metaphor of the interior as a fluid medium comes vividly to life. As in the ocean, the colours, the patterns of activity, and intensity of light change with the level.