EXCERPT

From the Introduction, by Ron Witte

Even before Toyo Ito's selection as the building's architect, the program was the most contested aspect of the project. The Mediatheque's organizational ethos fluctuated continuously as the city of Sendai, the members of the Project Committee, and eventually Ito himself aggressively debated the nature of spatial typologies-functionalist, Dom-ino, and universal space, among others. The discussions only became more volatile as the project progressed, initially through exchanges among the competition organizers, then in assessments of the submitted projects during the competition phase, and finally as Ito's design was developed following the competition.

Preliminary discussions within the Project Committee-comprised of architects, critics, politicians, and museum experts-centered on functional discretion versus integration. The committee reports reveal the extent of its influence on Ito's project and its role, ultimately, as Ito's coconspirator in an architectural gambit: "We can think every real culture, politics, or administration is a sort of game. And there is no game that does not change its rules while it is played." An initial diagram prepared by officials in Sendai in 1993 posits four distinct functional zones: a public gallery, a public library, a film/media center, and a barrier-free information center. In early 1994, Yasuaki Onoda-a lecturer in architecture at Tohoku University, Japan, and a member of the Project Committee-deftly reworked this diagram in such a way that it was entirely transformed (despite his proffering this new diagram as only a minor modification of the original). Inserting a previously nonexistent Workshop component, Onoda inscribed a Bauhaus-like nod to functionalism in the program; the Workshop appeared to be a quasi-Taylorist space (a kind of factory for the fabrication of media) that would support the "creation of barrier-free information." Yet Onoda was acutely aware of the Workshop being affected by two factors that radically altered its nominal functionalism. First, behind the facade of its carefully delineated organizational role in Onoda's new diagram, the Workshop was primarily a circulation device, an open-ended means of intertwining the Mediatheque's larger network of spaces. Second, the very idea of an info-shop was laced with irresolvable inconsistencies: the Taylorization of information production is improbable if not impossible. Information (in particular when qualified as barrier-free) is by nature indiscrete, making it meaningless to define its production using the spatially circumscribed terms upon which functionalism depends.

It is precisely here, at the intersection of Taylorism and programmatic indiscretion (under the guise of the Workshop and information), that the Mediatheque exhibits one of its most effective turns: Onoda's diagram exploited functionalism to cannibalize functionalism. In a program engaged in a continuous struggle for definition, the Workshop appears as a stable center of gravity, albeit one whose sole purpose is the dynamic atomization of the rest of the program. One is left with the exhilarating if somewhat unnerving sense of having absolutely no idea what is supposed to happen in these spaces.

Ito follows his own canon-ingesting instincts when he cites simultaneously the necessity to create and destroy universal space. The Mediatheque's seven floors are each comprised of three components: a 50 X 50m plate; the tubes; and a catalog of architectural buoys-walls, furniture, reference desks-whose tentative status maintains their ubiquitous vulnerability. Each of these components has a different effect on the definition of program and a different role in the creation and destruction of a total environment. The plates assert each floor's aspiration to "multilayered uniformity." They are replaceable surfaces inasmuch as they exist without fidelity to their occupation or to any particular location in the stack of plates that make up the building's section. The tubes have a double allegiance. In plan, at the scale of a floor plate, they create an "ABABA" spatial rhythm that implicates larger and smaller program areas in a quasi-classical center/aisle relationship. At the scale of the "A" zones, however, the tubes disallow the tidiness of this center/aisle reading because of the centrifugal spatial effects of their forms. Within a few meters of their rounded perimeters, space is repelled outward. The small-scale programs located in these areas are nebulously grounded, suspended between the comfortably "correct" intimacy of the "A" spaces of these side aisles and the indeterminate space of the "B" zones. The tentative architectures that Ito arrays on each floor substantiate his characterization of the Mediatheque's plates as "something like interchangeable floppy disks." Constructing variable densities rather than specified localities, the spatial formations of the furnishings are imbued with a deliberate diffidence; their notational systems are reformatted or erased as readily as they are written.