Book Review: Tarzans in the Media Forest, by Toyo Ito, selected & with an Intro by Thomas Daniell

Beginning in 2010, the Architecture Association AA Publication’s Architecture Words series, edited by the AA London School director, Brett Steele, attempts to depart from the ocularcentric domination of the discipline, reorienting the fundamentals of debate from critique of form and the favouring of images to the thought experiments behind contemporary built environments.

Following previous foci on artists such as Detlef Mertins, Bernard Cache and Max Bill, Toyo Ito, with his career long critique of consumerist culture, likening 21st Century inhabitants to “autistic robots,” was fittingly chosen as the interest of the eighth edition in the series, offering a polemic discussion to counterbalance normative architectural discourse[1]. First published in 2011, ‘Tarzans in the Media Forest’ represents the second exposition into Japanese architecture in the series, continuing from Kengo Kuma’s Anti-Object.

Thomas Daniell, a western architectural PhD scholar with a critical interest in what he calls “post-bubble” Japan, curatorially selected 17 seminal individual essays and architectural writings, in addition to authoring a foreword in hope of elucidating the nexus between the ever-evolving theories of Ito’s 40yr career[2]. Daniell, having issued critique on Ito prior to this compilation, departs from English translated pieces originally published in the likes of GA Japan and JA (Japan Architect) magazines, re-translating many texts himself in an effort to better capture the poetics of Ito’s prose and rhetoric[3]. A step potentially made to bridge the loss of accompanying imagery from previous publications. Despite predominantly acting as an anthology of republished texts, the addition of 2009 ‘Learning from a Tree’ as well as 2011 ‘Instead of an afterword’, act as a welcomed bookend compendium of Ito’s theories hitherto.

Just larger than a6 in size, and digestible in under a day, the Architecture Words series resembles the aesthetics of a guide book (sans images), a potential critique on the dynamism and global movement of the 21st Century architect. As such, apart from Thomas Daniell’s introduction, content, arrangement and scale, allow for editions to be read in the manner of a reference work, rather than beginning to end.

Moreover, whilst Daniell offers dates of original publication alongside the title of each essay to contextualise Ito’s writings with historical events in Japanese culture, essays are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, with the 1989 essay ‘Silver Hut’ appearing prior to 1988 works ‘What is the Reality of Architecture in a Futuristic City?’ and ‘Dismantling and Reconstituting the ‘House’ in a Disordered City.’ Consequently, Daniell creates more of a manual to Toyo Ito, able to be returned to or read in-consecutively depending on the area of interest along Ito’s trajectory.

Organised into what Daniell identifies as the four distinct theoretical developments in Ito’s career, unreferenced and seemingly detached contour drawings demarcate each “chapter”, offering the only differentiation from text[4]. Designed predominantly utilising the Palatino font family for assumed legibility and logistics (the condensed nature typeface allows for more characters per page, thus reducing the page count and maintaining the pocket-size ideology), contrast in content is made through the bolding and variation of typeface when referencing external information sources. Consequently, an imbalanced typographic hierarchy is formed that favours historical content, ranking referenced viewpoints over Ito’s own. Yet, the oddities of graphic presentation do not conclude here. 

The block silver book jacket, of what one can only assume is an arbitrary choice of colour, once removed (a crucial step if wanting to read the preface by Brett Steele printed on the inside front page) further displays the extent of condensation. Every spare inch of 187 pages has been utilised, with hardly any par breaks between conventional paragraphs, a potential satirical statement on the prolific digestion of content by the 21st Century architectural academic.

Despite offering a thoughtful contextualisation of Ito’s writings by examining the political, economic and sometimes cultural phenomena in Japan at the time (utilising first-hand knowledge from residing in Osaka during the economic recession and “Lost Decade” of the 1990s), to grasp the idiosyncrasies of Daniell’s analysis requires a considerable amount of prerequisite knowledge on architecture in Japan, and more specifically the difference of thought between the Kenzo Tange-led-Metabolist generation of architects and the Shinohara school[5].

Furthermore, creating a thematic divide of ‘Robot, City, Body and Nature’ coinciding, albeit forcefully, with Ito’s four decades of practice, suggests a mutually exclusivity between themes of ‘robot’ and ‘city.’ Yet, in URBOT-002 Useless Capsule House paper architecture, the “spacelike capsule” that permitted inhabitants to “survive in the city” becomes an extension of the urban environment upon the owner’s death, suggests reciprocity between themes[6].

A potential counter analysis separates Ito’s evolving discourse into concepts, rather than themes, of ‘critique,’ ‘abstraction’ and ‘return to origin,’ allowing for a thematic discussion of ‘city’ to be revisited throughout the entire span of Ito’s career.

In the 1971 article ‘The Logic of Uselessness’ coinciding with the opening of his own practice, URBOT and the commencement of the 1970s-1980s ‘critique’ conceptual period, Ito challenges the role of ontology in 21st Century, highlighting existential notions of emptiness, isolation and meaninglessness by portraying humans as “urban robots”, utilising dwelling-come-information terminals to “have sex, eat and sleep.” [7] Contrary to the theories of Le Corbusier, for Ito, the dwelling isn’t ‘a machine for living’, the inhabitant is the machine. So then, what becomes of the dwelling?

It is notably evident within Ito’s earlier writings he attempts to breakdown his own analysis of “future city” and “capsule-as-dwelling” philosophies adopted from the Metabolist school of thought during his time as an apprenticeship in the office of Kiyonori Kikutake. An era engrossed in introversion, led by the likes of Japanese architect, Kazuo Shinohara, claimed architecture should be a critical statement on society. Yet, Ito’s early attempts at finding his own critical-eye were yet to translate into successful physical applications, with the Aluminum House materialising as a diluted crosspollination of Shinohara’s theories of miniature utopias and Kikutake’s ‘future city.’

Unsurprisingly, the core argument of Ito’s writing is found within his evolving critique of Japan, or ‘city,’ used interchangeably in his anecdotal accounts. Although hyperbolic in nature, Ito characterises Japan during this period as a “smog covered,” “anarchic,” “bizarre urban forest,” enveloped with “concrete rubble,” somewhere between “natural or artificial.” In ‘Dismantling and Reconstructing the House in a Disordered City,’ Ito attempts to answer previous questioning around the design and program of a dwelling for the 21st Century android [8]. Conjuring an image of the ‘Tokyo nomad girl,’ Ito suggests the lived experience of urban spaces has become more fragmented, with contemporaries substituting conventional living and dining rooms for cinemas and bars, consequentially, creating a liberation from the modernist functions of a house. Unfortunately, the physical execution of such analysis is evident only in the reduction of furniture.  

Ito’s ‘abstraction’ period, seen in his essays of the 1990s sees a further development of theory by utilising tools of analogy, metaphor and diagram. Inspired by the iconographies of neo-futurist groups such as Archigram, Ito begins to overlay multiple abstractions of the microchip to stand in for the ‘city,’ distilling what he classifies as the cross-over characteristics of fluidity, multiplicity of layers and phenomenality[9]. Similarly, Ito calls upon the analogy of saran wrap to address concerns of homogeneity and consumerist pseudo-culture within the urban fabric.

Moving away from a “desire to replicate the tumultuous spaces of the city,” [10] Ito posits a dual concept of city-of-substance and city-as-phenomenon, an idea centred upon the understanding of two coinciding parallel existences – the physical alongside the virtual/illusory realm that transcends time and space[11]. A concept Ito utilises to comprehend the “android-like” population of the 21st Century, apparently sharing commonalities with the replicants of Philip K. Dick’s Blade Runner, Ito suggests it is in the superimposition of these two realms the design of a dwelling appropriate for the “new bodies” or “new real” of this era can be realised.

The third conceptual period, denoted as the ‘return to origin’, sees the maturation of Ito’s critique and abstraction of ‘city.’ Stating “architecture must be based on relativistic relationships with the environment” seems a far-cry from his previous portrayal of a dwelling as a survival suit[12]. Ito’s original descriptions of Tokyo as a chaotic labyrinth, seem to have softened and morphed into a sympathetic understanding of the legacy of the Edo period. Yet, Ito successfully finds a way of channeling his original critique of chaos by challenging the cartesian grid and Euclidean geometries within the tectonic expression, preferring architecture ‘composed with a complex order.’ 

In the 7 years since publication, the issue has sold-out virtually everywhere, with the edition now on back order by the publisher. Through his iterative analyses on the autistic ‘city’ of Japan, attempting to bridge the divide between the physical and virtual worlds, Ito has found liberation from the prescriptive pre-conceived adages of modernist architecture. The present review of Tarzans in the Media Forest seems lacking in formal analysis, absent itself in any imagery of Ito’s built works. However, to include photographs in the review of a series edition with the aim of quieting the emphasis on image rather than content would seem sacrilegious at best. The question of whether the Architecture Words format successfully fit with the writings of Ito an only be answered by the subjective reader.

However, it seems detrimental and reductive to have read Ito’s architectural writings through the lens of thematic divide, potentially missing an opportunity to further distill complex notions of ‘city’ throughout all four decades of work. Neglected by Daniell, it may have also rendered pertinent to link Ito’s childhood in Japanese-occupied Korea and Japan during the Allied Occupation to his allure to the Metabolist themes of ‘city,’ and ‘technology’ as well as his interest in neo-nomadism that has coated the majority of his work.

[1] T. Daniell, ed., Tarzans in the Media Forest (London: Architectural Association, 2011), 178.

[2] Thomas Daniell, After the crash: architecture in post-bubble Japan (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008)

[3] Daniell, Tarzans in the Media Forest, 17.

[4] Ibid., 15.

[5] Daniell, After the crash.

[6] Daniell, T., 29.

[7] Ibid., 22.

[8] Ibid., 69.

[9] Ibid., 103.

[10] Ibid., 57.

[11] Ibid., 93.

[12] Ibid., 175.