Oct 15th 2013

Visionary architect and 2013 Pritzker Prize Laureate Toyo Ito has been working on various public and private projects in Japan as well as internationally since the founding of his own office in 1971, Urban Robot (URBOT), which was renamed Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects in 1979. Since the completion of Sendai Mediatheque (2001), one of his most acclaimed works that has influenced younger generations of architects worldwide, Ito has explored architecture of the 21st century that goes beyond modernism’s purity and machine analogy, transforming organic geometries into life forms that reflect nature. In his lecture, Ito will discuss Home-for-All, communal spaces that were built for the towns washed away by the March 11, 2011, tsunami in Japan. Ito will reflect on how these spaces reveal the fundamental problems that exist within modernist architecture and how architecture should take form in the 21st century. Many of his completed projects have been awarded national and international honors. He received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the 8th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2002 and the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2006, as well as this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Work from Toyo Ito will be featured in the News From Nowhere exhibition at the Sullivan Galleries.

This lecture is jointly supported by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Visiting Artists Program; Department of Exhibitions and Exhibitions Studies; William H. Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lectureship in Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects; the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; the Butler-VanderLinden Lecture on Architecture endowment of the Architecture & Design Society at the Art Institute of Chicago; and AIA Chicago. The Architecture & Design Society gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of Park Hyatt Chicago. Additional support is provided by the National Building Museum.

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