Sendai, Japan. In my first weeks in Japan I spent hours sitting on the floor of an old temple in my neighbourhood. Literally, spaced out. Never before had I experienced such a limitless space within a small compound. It is surrounded by a solid wall, but the architecture of the light wooden building within the yard dissolves the feeling of enclosure. Everything is horizontal: a lifted platform, a low roof. The view does not go very far though. Rather, the space evokes a different kind of seeing. There is no perspective. No focal point. No gravity. No back. No front. No up. No down.
Later I visited the newly built Mediathek in Sendai designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito. Both spaces, the one traditional and the other futuristic, felt the same.
Ito’s Mediathek is easy to grasp: Plates, tubes, and skin. Seven square plates are stacked up in different heights and kept in place by thirteen irregularly placed tubes. These tubes are geometrically slightly distorted and structurally reduced to a minimally necessary netlike pattern. Since they are hollow, the building appears lightest where it is heaviest. Gravity disappears. The immediate surrounding is unpretentious, a mid-sized hotel, a fuel station, small houses. All four facades are transparent skins of different kinds. The building seems to merge into its surrounding, despite it huge size. It is anything but monumental. Rather it dissolves into its context. Toyo Ito’s Mediathek in Sendai offers a space that is specific and neutral at the same time. A space of buoyancy rather than gravity. A defined space, however, without a center, beginning or end.
The temple and the Mediathek reflect the same idea of space, which is suggested by the meaning of the word “Kukan”. It consists of the signs for air and interval. This is the opposite of the idea of the German word for space. “Raum” etymologically derives from the activity of making a clearance in the forest, of cutting out a void from a solid. In Japan, space is experienced differently. It is not an enclosure. It is not against, but within its context. Space is merely an interval in the infinite.Sendai, Japan. In my first weeks in Japan I spent hours sitting on the floor of an old temple in my neighbourhood. Literally, spaced out. Never before had I experienced such a limitless space within a small compound. It is surrounded by a solid wall, but the architecture of the light wooden building within the yard dissolves the feeling of enclosure. Everything is horizontal: a lifted platform, a low roof. The view does not go very far though. Rather, the space evokes a different kind of seeing. There is no perspective. No focal point. No gravity. No back. No front. No up. No down.
Later I visited the newly built Mediathek in Sendai designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito. Both spaces, the one traditional and the other futuristic, felt the same.
Ito’s Mediathek is easy to grasp: Plates, tubes, and skin. Seven square plates are stacked up in different heights and kept in place by thirteen irregularly placed tubes. These tubes are geometrically slightly distorted and structurally reduced to a minimally necessary netlike pattern. Since they are hollow, the building appears lightest where it is heaviest. Gravity disappears. The immediate surrounding is unpretentious, a mid-sized hotel, a fuel station, small houses. All four facades are transparent skins of different kinds. The building seems to merge into its surrounding, despite it huge size. It is anything but monumental. Rather it dissolves into its context. Toyo Ito’s Mediathek in Sendai offers a space that is specific and neutral at the same time. A space of buoyancy rather than gravity. A defined space, however, without a center, beginning or end.
The temple and the Mediathek reflect the same idea of space, which is suggested by the meaning of the word “Kukan”. It consists of the signs for air and interval. This is the opposite of the idea of the German word for space. “Raum” etymologically derives from the activity of making a clearance in the forest, of cutting out a void from a solid. In Japan, space is experienced differently. It is not an enclosure. It is not against, but within its context. Space is merely an interval in the infinite.