Thread Research On Toyo Ito’s Architectural Innovation

The famous Japanese architect Toyo Ito, who has been engaged himself in this field for more than four decades, is still keeping active in the frontier architecture exploration. He was awarded the Pritzker Prize in2013. During the process of seeking "what is architecture", Ito has constantly digged out new possibilities and used them to catch each era’s new feature, especially the illuminating thought and architectural practices to the new relationship in technological advances, architecture, human and nature under later Media age. His attitude and corresponding strategies to the architectural innovation has highly value to study. A series of Ito’s work presented with varied form and different external feature which make others difficult to grasp the whole picture of his architecture. Under foregoing complex appearance, this article focus on the searching of interior evolving innovation thread.Using Ito’s accomplished projects and his architectural thought as the main research object, this paper try to sort out the evolving process of his innovation through building a time framework. In chapter2, treat Ito’s personal experience before being a architect as some influential factors to effect his later direction of innovation. In subsequent three chapter, use his writing and interviews as the major carriers of his architectural thought to analyse the binding relationship between his thought and practice, in the meantime, find out a new possibility to read his changeable work with a eye of New Dom-ino system. Combined his own process of projects with other architects’lenghwise comparison, this article wants to clarify his every breakthrough’s feature and direction, and then finally summarize his innovation thread on both thought and operation which may bring some fresh inspiring ideas to Chinese architects.