Without a doubt Toyo  Ito is one of the most remarkable and influential architects from the last decades. Houses like ‘White U’ for his sister, in the nineteen seventies, were silent universes in themselves. In the nineteen eighties, Ito’s work celebrated nomadic life and the mediatisation of our world with light and open constructions, like his own house ‘Silver Hut’ and the ‘Tower of Winds’, one of the first buildings almost solely consisting of an interactive media installation. As a theoretician and curator, he regularly expressed his ideas in writings, installations and exhibitions. The mediatheque in Sendai, realized between 1997 and 2000, became a turning point in his work, which ever since goes through stunning transformations, largely enabled through intensive collaborations with the most innovative structural engineers. These lead to adventurous projects like the Taichung Metropolitan Opera House in Taiwan. More important than that, Ito has been calling for a new relationship between architecture and the natural environment beyond modernism.