Everything Else, Void: Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque

The Sendai Mediatheque in Japan, opened in 2001, is one of Toyo Ito’s best-known buildings. It is made of just three things: 13 tubes, thin floor slabs and a skin of glass. Inside, there is not a single ordinary column. In January 1995, on his way to London, Ito sketched it on the train to Narita and faxed it back to Tokyo; on the sketch he wrote that everything else should be “void”. This short film tells how the building was conceived, why it looks the way it does, and who the empty space was left for. A personal, non-commercial study. Narration is synthesised speech; illustrations and animated shots are AI-generated, and figures in them are illustrative; 3D models are illustrative. Credits Voice: Toyo Ito, 2020 talk at Sendai Mediatheque · Speech: Toyo Ito, 2013 Pritzker Prize acceptance speech Footage: Yiwen Zhang · 理想の住まい研究所 · タナカアツシ Atsushi Tanaka · JMF Japan Miyagi Film · JAPAN CALENDAR · Dezeen (CC BY 3.0) Photos (Wikimedia Commons): 掬茶 (CC BY-SA 4.0); Kenta Mabuchi (CC BY-SA 2.0); Wiiii (CC BY-SA 3.0); Ing.stema (public domain); Rama (CC BY-SA 2.0 FR); 金沢市 Kanazawa City (CC BY 2.1 JP); Fridolin freudenfett (CC BY-SA 4.0); ajay_suresh (CC BY 2.0); JackyM59 (CC BY-SA 3.0) Sketch: Toyo Ito, 1995 competition sketch (from an Architects not Architecture livestream, 2021) Illustrations and animated shots: AI-generated (Midjourney Niji 7, Seedance 2.5) Music: AI-generated (ElevenLabs Eleven Music)