HOUSE FOR THE TOKYO NOMAD GIRL

Toyo Ito
The relationship between house and furniture in Toyo Ito’s architecture is made explicit
by the “Pao for the Tokyo Nomad Girl”. In this installation, made of a translucent tent
where a girl makes herself up, listens to music or has a tea, furniture becomes the main
issue of the design by means of becoming architecture. The idea of a dwelling as an
architectural object with a recognisable shape and as an interior is no longer the aim.
The important thing is now the furniture or devises that are the environment where the
nomad girl lives.

The house gets shattered outwards, giving up its functions up to premises throughout
the city, and inwards, handing over the prominent role of the spaces to the devices. The
objects that were designed for the pao, as well as the pao itself, reflect the features of
the city where they are: independence, fragmentation and lightness.

“They were all transient objects like mirage without the feeling of
texture or existence. They are ephemeral objects which are more of
spontaneous phenomena like a rainbow than structures”
Toyo Ito, “Architecture in a simulated city”

The shift of the house towards the objects reflects a change in the ways of living in
contemporary Japan: the customer of the traditional house is a family, while the House
for the Nomad Girl is aimed to a sole isolated individual such as the girl “that wanders
around the immense plain of the media called Toyo”.