Wall Street Journal (May 10)
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo survived the great Kanto earthquake of 1923. Nearly a century later, Toyo Ito’s Mediatheque in Sendai is also winning accolades as a “legendary earthquake survivor.” The airy, glass building could not be more stylistically removed from Wright’s Hotel. Yet both architects employed innovative designs, working closely with engineers to ensure structural stability. The inspiration for Mediatheque was “a virtual world of indeterminate, seaweed-like tubes swaying freely as they supported floor plates, as though the architecture were without weight or dimension.” In 2002, a Harvard Graduate School of Design publication stated, “no building has pushed architectural or structural thought further than the Sendai Mediatheque.” Withstanding the quake proves the resilience of this design.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo survived the great Kanto earthquake of 1923. Nearly a century later, Toyo Ito’s Mediatheque in Sendai is also winning accolades as a “legendary earthquake survivor.” The airy, glass building could not be more stylistically removed from Wright’s Hotel. Yet both architects employed innovative designs, working closely with engineers to ensure structural stability. The inspiration for Mediatheque was “a virtual world of indeterminate, seaweed-like tubes swaying freely as they supported floor plates, as though the architecture were without weight or dimension.” In 2002, a Harvard Graduate School of Design publication stated, “no building has pushed architectural or structural thought further than the Sendai Mediatheque.” Withstanding the quake further proves the resilience of this design.
