Toshiko Mori

portrait by Tadayuki Naito / text by Editorial Staff

Born in Kobe to Japanese parents, Mori has resided in New York since high school. She established her office, Toshiko Mori Architect, in New York City in 1981 and has applied her versatile design talents to museums, galleries, institutional facilities, retail spaces, and residences, as well as furniture, graphics, and drawing. The recipient of numerous awards, she has rarely had a year without recognition for her accomplishments. In addition to her work as an architect, she is a dedicated educator: Currently chair of the department of architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, she has been a tenured professor there since 1995, an associate professor at Cooper Union (her alma mater) for 14 years, and a lecturer at Columbia, Yale, and many other institutions. She is actively involved with cultural exchange and training the next generation of international architects.
Pushing the boundaries of materials forms one of the essential components of Mori's architectural approach. She regularly collaborates with specialists in many fields of science and technology to pursue her ongoing research into innovative materials and their possible use in architecture.
As a follow-up to the influential book on materials and light, Immaterial/Ultramaterial, Mori is currently editing her next book, Weaving, Materials, and Habitation.
Web site: www.tmarch.com.

Defying definition: an architecture of materials that crosses cultures and ages

Kateigaho International encountered the name Toshiko Mori in a full-page color article about young Japanese architects in the Home Section of the November 6, 2003, New York Times. While sensing that important new currents in the architectural world are emerging in the young talents introduced, we were especially drawn to Mori, who maintains an office in New York City while playing a leading role in the educational environment at the source of these new currents.

Born to Japanese parents and raised in Japan, Mori moved to the United States during high school upon her father's transfer, thereafter making New York her home. We wanted to learn more about how this woman, with an intimate knowledge of cultures as diverse as East and West, is applying her unique experiences to the field of architecture.

With the world increasingly becoming a melting pot of cultures, religions, and customs, it is more important than ever for those at the top of their fields to work from a mutual knowledge and understanding of multiple cultures. Furthermore, working in a realm that transcends cultural differences often generates the most fundamental creation. As we read more about Mori's architecture, the keyword "material" surfaced with force. Her innovative thinking in this area, so fundamental to the building arts, makes her precisely the kind of architect—and educator—our times need most.

Razor-thin plywood strips were woven and crafted into shapes that look light enough to float on air. They appeared in "Immaterial / Ultramaterial," a 2001-2002 exhibition of research into materials by Harvard students led by Mori, Nader Tehrani, Marco Steinberg, and Ron Witte, who also collaborated on a book by the same title.
photograph by Paul Warchol
Mori used a polymer film (normally used in ATM computer screens) on the internal glass facade of the Issey Miyake Pleats Please boutique in SoHo.
photograph by Paul Warchol

The East traditionally emphasizes horizontal planes, rendering architectural lines that parallel the ground. Western architecture, by contrast, tends to be more conscious of walls, stressing vertical lines. Mori's architecture has a reputation for horizontality. This is a superficial observation, however, because upon more thorough investigation, her work clearly belongs to no genre—Eastern, Western, or mixed.

She recollects her childhood years in an impoverished, postwar Japan, where through her parents and grandmothers she developed a sense of respect and appreciation for things. She speaks of being taught to value things in times when goods were scarce, and of her grandmother making dolls from scraps of fabric. Over time, those childhood experiences led to a strong awareness that materials herald origins, harbor life, and convey cultural meaning; indeed, material lies at the heart of all cultures. Only when employed to their fullest potential, however, do materials fulfill their mission.

Mori focuses on the innate qualities of materials, methods of fabrication, and their potential application in architecture. Professionally, she divides her time among research, practice, and sharing those processes with the next generation, i.e. education. Her pursuit is both time- and labor-intensive. Several academic approaches philosophy, engineering, physics, chemistry — enter the thinking about materials; the subject is truly multidisciplinary. Likewise, there are multiple approaches to fabrication: hand crafting passed down from ancient times, mechanical, and now computer-generation and other cutting-edge technologies. Drawing on these processes for Mori is akin to unraveling hundreds of fibers and spinning them into futuristic yarns for use in weaving a new outerwear known as architecture.

Mori believes material is the lingua franca of all generations, cultures, and environments. Take papers for example: When people—young and old, male and female, Western and Asian, city-dwellers and villagers—touch paper, it triggers related memories. Architecture today no longer exists simply as architecture—it must be sympathetic to the environment, mindful of the need to recycle natural materials, and aware of promising synthetic materials. There is increasing demand for a serious posture on the common language of material. Whether the characteristics of fiberglass—material presently in vogue—are exploited or killed, or used to create cool spaces or warm ones is a question of the architect's sensibilities.

Shimmering cascades of fabric were featured in "Structure & Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles," an exhibition designed and produced by Mori at New York's Museum of Modern Art (1998-1999).

Mori is currently experimenting with weaving materials like fiberglass and carbon fiber to create new fabrics. The act of weaving is a form of human wisdom shared across ages, cultures, and environments. Furthermore it is a process that can be executed by hand, machine, or computer. Hand knitting and loom weaving are of course common feats, but because weaving is binary it can also be digitized.

In ancient Japan the act of intersecting the warp and woof in weaving was sacred, extending into the spiritual realm. Throughout history we have wrapped ourselves in textiles. How will tomorrow's spaces, defined by woven architectural materials, speak to our five senses? The experience—and the answer—are not far off.

One response will be the Darwin D. Martin House Visitors' Center (scheduled for completion in 2005) in Buffalo, New York. It is Mori's addition to the residential complex designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. She intends the roof to be a woven carbon-fiber structure with a fiberglass surface. Deep overhangs will provide shade in the summer, yet allow sunlight to enter and warm spaces in the winter. What's more, the roof will be inverted to collect snow and rain and channel it into a holding tank for irrigating the garden.

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