About Toyo Ito

Toyo Ito was born in 1941 and graduated from the University of Tokyo’s architecture department in 1965. In 1972, he founded his own office, Urban Robot (URBOT) which was renamed Toyo Ito & Associates Architects in 1979. Ito is known for creating conceptual architecture that seeks to simultaneously express the physical and virtual worlds. He is a leading exponent of architecture that addresses the contemporary notion of a “simulated” city, and has been called one of the world’s most innovative and influential architects. His designs revolve around the equilibrium between the private life and the metropolitan, “public” life of an individual. In doing so, he seeks to find new spatial conditions that manifest the philosophy of borderless beings. His works are the embodiment of his flexible and novel idea that has been garnering attention from in and outside of Japan. His most remarkable contributions are an exploration of a new type of museum “Sendai Mediatheque (2001)”, one of the masterpieces of Pritzker Prize-winning architecture “White U (1976)” and “Silver Hut (1984)” that is a highly acclaimed house which marks the culmination of his work in the ’80s. Since 2000, he has globally handled public buildings, and he was awarded UIA Gold Medal in 2017.