KOGANEI

In 1979 Toyo Ito built a small house, a two-story steel structure with cement panel cladding, that would revolutionise architecture 20 years later. Seen in the context of the projects he designed just before or just after, it is weirdly unassuming. There is none of the space-age inspired exuberance of his Urbot years and his Aluminum House, none of the formal complexity of the small hotel and the few houses he built in the late 1970s: nothing more, in essence, than a simple rectangular shoe box with a strip window.