Toyo Ito Architecture: White U to Branzi 2026
Toyo Ito spent five decades teaching Japanese architecture to dissolve the line between building and atmosphere; in 2026, at eighty-four, he turned around at Triennale Milano and dedicated the show to someone else. Andrea Branzi: Continuous Present, open at the Palazzo dell’Arte until 4 October 2026, is conceived by Ito as a posthumous reading of the Florentine radical who died in 2023. The institutional curators of record are Stefano Bassoli and Francesca Alessandrini, but the conceptual force is Ito’s, and reading the show without the rest of his work — White U, Silver Hut, the Tower of Winds, Sendai Mediatheque, the TOD’S facade, Tama Library, Taichung — is to miss the argument. This piece walks the Toyo Ito architecture lineage from a concrete U-shape built for his sister in Nakano in 1976 to a Milan exhibition that argues a different Italian read of the same questions Ito has been asking in Japan for fifty years. ...