Interview with Shoei Yoh at his home in Fukuoka, Fall 2012.

For these two large public gymnasium facilities,

developed in the same period around 1991, Shoei
Yoh paid special attention to the design of the roof.
For both Odawara and Galaxy Toyama the regular
geometry of the ground floor, often determined by
the form and size of the different sports fields, is
juxtaposed with a fluid three-dimensional
membrane that covers the entire complex.
Acquiring an almost textile-like quality, the roof is
in fact a non-standard wireframe structure
composed of individual steel rods and joints; a
system evolved from previous research Yoh
conducted with prefabricated assembled
construction techniques, in particular the MERO
system. The different length and angle of each
individual rod allows him to modify the depth of the
roof itself, to create, in his own words, a “3D
topology,” which is both sustainable and
economical. The dimensioning of roof elements
responds to certain external factors, calculated and
verified by the computers of the consulting
engineering company Taiyo Kogyo. In the case of
Galaxy Toyama these factors were the weight of
snowfall and the predominant winds on the site,
while in the case of Odawara it was the distribution
of natural light through the building. Galaxy
Toyama was finally executed, while Odawara has
remained at the stage of preliminary design.

Yoh imbues the buildings and environments he

designs with the experience of forces in nature.
The physical phenomena of light, form and
material always define the ambition of his designs.
In two gymnasiums, Odawara and Galaxy Toyama,
Yoh explored structurally optimized forms that
responded to the requirements of the space
enclosed by the long roof spans as well as snow
loads, wind forces and daylight. Digital modelling
and simulation done in collaboration with structural
engineers and contractors resulted in complex
geometries of space frame structures. The
sensibility guiding his use of digital technology in
these two projects is that the forms and moiré
patterns of the roofs are evocative and reminiscent
of the natural and structural forces from which
their design is derived. Like many architects and
engineers before him, Yoh used technology to
produce optimal and complex patterns of the kind
found in nature. Working with both German and
Japanese engineering software he used digital
tools for analysis, form generation and one of the
first-ever instances of a direct-to-manufacture
construction method. Using custom CNC drilled
ball joints he was able to produce each structural
member in a unique dimension at no extra cost.
Greg Lynn: Could you tell us about your background in
economics and about shifting from economics to
architecture?

Shoei Yoh: There is no interruption between economics

and design—they are technically connected. Economics,
or econometrics, deals with statistics of the past. We
consider many parameters which correlate with supply
and demand curves in order to predict, for instance, how
many cars will be sold next year. We have to find out what
parameter—gross national product, the weather, interest
rates—influences the demand curve, which goes straight
down when prices go up. But in one case I studied, the
opposite effect happened: More cars sold at a higher
price. I was so puzzled. I had to check whether I’d made
a mistake in the statistics, until I realized that the higher
price was for a deluxe model with white tires. It was more
expensive, but it sold better than the regular models.
Anyway, then the economic principle is applied: Minimize
the cost and maximize the profit or effect. I felt design
was the same, and I still believe that. Its nature is
economical.
The shape of the folded roof over the Odawara Municipal Sports Complex …
is the result of structural analysis developed with the engineering company
Taiyo Kogyo. The primary design feature of the project as well as the
component dependent on a digital medium for its design, documentation,
manufacture and construction is the three-dimensional roof truss. The
horizontal plan of the building is organized according to a simple geometry
that determines a regular grid for the placement of columns, with spans
defined by the sports activities. The roof is deformed to adapt to the
surrounding context and to allow natural light into the building. In section,
the roof acquires an un- even thickness based on the computer analysis of
loading the variable spans.

1/

GL: We don’t need to dwell on the role of the computer,

but to me, you represent the phenomenology of the
digital. You’re one of the first people who was interested in
using the computer to think through people’s affinity to
space. I also think that your interest in the economy of
construction meant that digital tools helped you make
things more optimal, or more efficient. Are these two
things connected, in your mind? That an efficient
structure is also an economical structure? How does the
computer function in that design loop?

SY: The first time I experienced computer analysis in

structural design was in 1985 or 1986, while designing
the Oguni Dome in Kumamoto. It was the biggest wooden
roof designed for a gymnasium in Japan. Computer
analysis allowed us to experiment and to verify how safe
the structure was. Until then, in the history of Japanese
wooden construction, nobody had been able to accurately
model or predict the degree of safety. For me, it was the
beginning of understanding the structure itself. The roof
structure was very light, but it had to account for two
critical loads, snow and wind, which work in opposite
directions on the structure. Computer analysis revealed
that we could distribute different thicknesses of wood
according to the various tensile or compressive forces, so
that wood members could be different in section but
almost equal in length. At the time we were supposed to
use young cedar wood—after the war we planted many
trees—which was very dense compared to the old cedar
wood. So we used small and big cedar trees at the same
time, and computer simulation showed that if one
member of the timber structure broke, the other
members would respond together so that the roof didn’t
collapse. I thought that was a good analogy of a
community, in which neighbours help each other in
disaster situations. That was the beginning of computer
simulation for me.
Schematic sections showing varying depth of roof trusses

1990–91. Digital prints on paper, 56.4 x 34.5 cm

Fabrizio Gallanti: When you started using a computer to

make these simulations, was the software that you
needed already available, or did you have to discuss with
engineers and software programmers how to improve,
change or adapt existing computer software?

SY: When I decided to use a spaceframe with steel globe

joints produced in Japan, licensed from the German
company MERO, I asked them to do the calculations. I
was looking for some good connections, but I thought,
this joint can be replaced or changed, and so I decided to
use it. They have computerized production, as well. At the
time, it was expensive to make connectors. But the MERO
joints were made by industrial production, that’s why they
were cheaper. Besides, it was my first time experience of
public design—public architecture—for which I was
directly responsible to the taxpayers and the mayor of this
town. I was also responsible for the economies of the
town, for example utilizing all the timber which was locally
abundant in the mountains.
GL: When you started using computer software, it was
analysis that was used for manufacturing, is that correct?
You weren’t really using digital technology and then trying
to figure out how to build, but working with technology
from the builders?

SY: I asked the people from Taiyo Kogyo, which was the
production manufacturer, if anybody had ever asked
them to produce something like we were doing, to
account for different heights or depths of the beam. But it
was only us in 1990 or 1991. At that time only we cared
about the high quality of the computerized manufacturing
analysis. And even now the three-dimensional truss has
got the same depth, with the different sizes of steel tubes.
Nobody else has tried to change the depth according to
the bent force, or any force. Heavyweight snow was the
most critical load for the big roof spans I designed for
Odawara and the Galaxy Toyama Hall. So I carefully
recorded the changing depth of the truss. I solicited the
engineer at Taiyo Kogyo—he examined many times back
and forth, changing the depth or relocating the supporting
posts to support, in order to get enough slope for water
drainage. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
objects had to be made the same—like the Ford Model-T
—to increase productivity and lower prices. Mass-
production was more economical then. But the computer,
through modelling, can account for all different kinds of
shapes, lengths, and wood angles, so that production
costs remain the same or are cheaper, sometimes even
saving energy and decreasing CO2 emissions.
 

1/

FG: There are two concepts that are very interesting here:
One is the concept of simulation. Through the computer,
you can think of the building more as a machine or
organism, predict how it will function and even iterate,
while in older engineering models you could only
calculate that it would resist some effects. The other
concept is that of customization; finally now we are
getting closer to the idea that it might be possible to break
apart this model of industry, from design to production,
where, to bring down costs, you always produce the same
shape. Now we are getting closer to an alternative. So I
would like to understand the relationship between
simulation and customization. How do you see this
evolution, having anticipated it already, almost thirty years
ago?

SY: Optimization is a natural phenomenon. Anywhere we

go, we are surrounded by nature, trees, etc. And nature is
economical, no matter what we do. Artificial things are
unnatural, right? That means we’re trying to find the easy
way, and no matter how much we spend, we waste the
materials. But nature does not waste. Computer
simulation shows us how the building will collapse. We
can see how the building will naturally terminate; I can
decide how it collapses and how to build it at the same
time.
In the design of Galaxy Toyama Gymnasium, software used to calculate …
the dimensioning of trusses was applied to determine the length and
respective angle of each roof element. The computer model of these lengths
as well as the precise angles of all connections to the universal ball joints are
converted into precise numerical data that drives the CNC manufacturing of
the elements used for construction. The form and moiré patterns of the roof
evoke the natural and structural forces from which its design is derived. The
computer renderings represent abstract diagrams of the forces acting on
different parts of the trusses, which generate a surface that appears as soft
fabric. Yoh used digital technology to find optimal forms designed for specific
loads, natural light and span that also yield complex patterns of the kind
found in nature.

1/

GL: If I could ask you about your phenomenological

interests, I’d like to know, what is your interest in light?
And what’s your view on the relationship between
geometry and materials? Because it seems like every
project has a geometric idea and a material idea that
almost came at the same time.
SY: And lighting, too.

GL: And lighting too—so what do you think?

SY: Light comes first—like in the Pantheon. In the Ingot

coffee shop, for instance, I made everything transparent,
with chromium-plated double-glazing and a silicon
adhesive floating on the structure of the surface. It was a
kind of a dream for me to make everything in glass. The
Ingot coffee shop was four by twenty-two metres long. It’s
an object; a geometrical form. So it’s remembered by
people—the geometric shape—like a pyramid, I would
say. Geometry lives long, no matter what. If we do
anything, make an addition to it, it becomes an action;
like my signature. The entrance of Ingot is my signature:
It’s gouged. So light, geometry and material happen like
this.

FG: I would like to go back to Odawara and Galaxy. What

were the key ideas that you wanted to push in these
projects; what were your main objectives?

SY: Well I had very few opportunities to make a huge

gymnasium, with such a long span. When we were
designing Galaxy Toyama Hall, it was for an exposition,
and it was planned as a double or triple room also with
temporary buildings. But we made one a permanent
building. It became a steel structure, it was the only
choice. It could have just been flat against the heavy
weight of snow. So this heavy snow was in my head at the
time. But after solving the question with the different sizes
and depths of the three-dimensional truss, why not use
this for Odawara? My solution was to make a uniform roof,
without showing the joints, so that it would be huge but
also economical and satisfy all the requirements for the
gymnasium; allowing for many different kinds of games in
various places, so that it responds functionally to certain
requirements like height, or other considerations like
acoustics and lighting. I always wanted natural light, even
for a big gymnasium like in Oguni. We don’t need artificial
light in the daytime. We always use daylight, like the
Pantheon…

FG: So is the idea, really, that first you design the roof and
the building extends down? It’s not the building that grows
from the ground up…

GL: No, I think it does. Don’t Galaxy and Odawara have

very different plans?

SY: Yes, completely different. The scale is different.

GL: But in both cases, the plan drives the height of the
roof—because of the proportion of the room, and also the
span, which changes it. So, for both you kind of started
from the plan and the roof derived from that.

SY: The roof is a result.

 

1/

GL: But in terms of the expression of the project, there

are a lot of things in your work that float, that suspend, or
cantilever. Like the house we’re in. Could you talk about
your interest in suspension?

SY: All of the columns support against gravity. Gravity is

very selfish to need to go straight down somewhere, to be
anchored. But we want to have a roof no matter where we
have columns. For this house we have suspension rods,
so a roof can be anywhere; it can be as wide as you want.
The cantilever is also my favourite vocabulary. It gives us
the uplift. If we have a cantilever with a thick shadow, it
feels heavy. But as long as it’s lit, it feels light and we
forget about gravity at the moment we see it. The roof is
heavy; one of the orders of Modernism is how to support
the roof. European architectural culture is more or less
brick and stone masonry for walls, with girders supporting
the roof, so that the wall becomes thick; it’s a limitation of
human activity. Walls always stop what we want to do. But
if we have only columns, we can go through—the air, the
light, everything goes through it. It’s a liberation of the
space, not a limitation of it. The most primitive hut is a
roof with a pole… an umbrella!

GL: What frustrates or concerns you about digital

technology? Are you at all suspicious of it?

SY: I’m frustrated that whatever I did was not so well

appreciated. Only a few publishers have featured my
work. When I was young in the 1960s, my dream was to
be published by Domus, first of all. I admired Italian
designs, da Vinci and Michelangelo. They were more than
architects, more than designers. There’s no barrier
between the designer, the contractor and the architect. I
thought of design as a tool to innovate for the future. I
really admired Dr. Paul MacCready, who won the first
Kremer Prize with his man-powered airplane. And Frei
Otto—I bought his book in the 1970s and I read and read
and read and traced his followers too… even Norman
Foster, I could see, traced Frei Otto’s little pen sketches. I
see the Renault Centre or the Hong Kong and Shanghai
Bank Headquarters in Frei Otto’s book. I was only an
interior designer, not having built any architecture yet,
and I was fascinated with the beauty of construction
engineering. Any student, any architect, can learn from
his unlimited possibilities for dealing with the varieties of
tension, stress, compression—there are many things I
could have found from reviewing his book, page by page.
Study Model for roof of Galaxy Toyama

1990-1992. Metal wire, paint, black plastic sheet, matboard. 3 x 42 x 31,4 cm

GL: I know a lot of architects who admire Frei Otto, but it

becomes like a religion for them.

SY: Religion?

GL: Yeah—they believe only in form-finding; that there is

one solution to everything. What’s interesting is that you
are interested in these engineering and science-based
approaches without shutting down or, well, changing your
design process.

SY: I have been keeping distance from my predecessors.

That’s the only way to be myself. As long as I create
something, it should be unique to me. And I hope it lives
long, as long as possible. I don’t mean durability, but an
affinity with people, maybe, and also my innovations
which can help people, like bamboo. I made bamboo
constructions twenty years ago, but nobody from Asia
asked me to do it, only people from Chile. Or, I don’t know
how, but the Vitra Design Museum was interested and
published the bamboo structures. Nobody asked me to
design them, ever, but I believe there is good reason
these will be continued in the future—it seems to be the
right answer at this time…

FG: Just to follow on from Greg’s question, watching your

career, it seems that every project is an occasion to make
very specific and very precise research and development.
So how do you begin the process each time? Which are
the things that for you are most important to understand?
Is it the context, program, function, dialogue with the
client? Because I understand each project is a
consequence of a very deep process. Could you tell us
more about when the simulation happens—is it only at
the end to understand the structure, or at the beginning?
What stays the same and what changes about the
process each time?

SY: I’ve been repeating the same process. I review the

past work and listen to it. Then I start from zero, like
Gropius. When he founded the Bauhaus, he said: “Start
from zero.” So that’s what I’m doing. I look at the past
history or the context, as you said, and many things
around it, and the geographical location, too, is the most
fundamental design source. From the client there are
requests and requirements, functions and performance.
When I was appointed to design a civic centre, with a
primary school and community centre, in the middle of a
city in Fukui Prefecture with ancient castles, 400 years
old, I could not use the flat roof or other designs which I
had been doing. I chose an ordinary roof that could bear
tons of heavy snow. I did a single-storey building, 150
metres square, with a playground, a gymnasium, an
auditorium and a swimming pool. And I recalled the most
essential function of the eaves, and extended the veranda
three to four metres from the inside out so that people
could walk around, with sliding doors all over. The
columns are the only restrictions, everything else is free.
Partitions can be removed anywhere you like. So it will
have the opportunity to be remodelled, to live long. A
century ago, the government started importing the
Western way of education; building schools without eaves,
without the veranda around the house and without sliding
doors. If you visit any primary school in Japan you will
never find sliding doors, dividers or screens made of
wood, bamboo and paper. Of course, this time we used
aluminum doors, and fibreglass paper to divide the
rooms, so that we can recover the solidarity and affinity
among the students and teachers living … under the
same roof. It’s one room. Actually, you might say there’s
no privacy. You can hear whatever happens in the next
room. But if you shut the screen—the sliding doors are
easy to move and stop anywhere you want, so you can
keep one hundred or fifty or thirty percent… So, I
thought, the wisdom of the Japanese is the ordinary
house. Every house used to have a south-facing veranda
that could be opened for playing games or cooking,
washing, sewing. You can do anything on the veranda,
and the sunlight comes in during the wintertime. In
summer the eaves stop the light, and reflect the daylight
coming deep inside the room. Why not recover the
ordinary house? Besides, after the war, reinforced
concrete was the only choice for school buildings, after
the fire bombings. Bombing was so destructive here,
because the houses were made of bamboo and wood and
paper; it’s not necessary to use the atomic bomb. We
didn’t have such good buildings as Europe. Easy to break,
but easy to repair. And the carpenters took care of them,
every year.

1/

GL: Is lightness in construction important to you?

SY: Yes. I wrote an essay titled “Light is Light and Light.”

Light has no weight, but has brightness.

GL: I don’t know what computer image you first saw in

relation to one of your projects, but let’s say in Galaxy
Toyama, what was your first thought when you saw the
digital model? What was your reaction to the image on
screen?

SY: I was very much pleased to see the response to the

natural phenomenon of the snow load, because the
heaviness of snow was, in my head, on the roof. Oh, that
weight, how can I resist it? The depth of the beams would
all be two metres or three metres or something like that. I
had heard the story of Isozaki’s project for the Barcelona
Olympics, with a roof that suggested the image of
Montjuïc Hill. But he was forced to change to a
completely different method, a different technology,
because they couldn’t afford it. Then, when I found the
solution to make the roof three-dimensionally supple,
curvilinear… It was a dream for me, because I was so
fascinated by Isozaki’s idea.

GL: And what were your reactions to computer use when

you taught at Columbia University? What did you think
when you saw those things?

SY: (Laughs.) I was confused. I didn’t know how to do it

because I was not good at handling the computer. Even
now, no. Really.

GL: But I think you handled it well for those two projects.

SY: Not by myself, I need help. I have to have good

assistants. People around me, like my son, or friends or
companies. The high technology came from Germany
first, and was introduced to us in 1970. They were a
membrane company—they made the tent for the
American pavilion in Osaka that year, a flat dome with air
pressure. That’s why I think I was so fortunate to pick up
the MERO company and their computer analysis
technology and computer controlled production. Without
this help, no. That’s why I started with hand-woven
bamboo—local primitive material—and poured concrete
outside. It was the cheapest way, rather than having
plywood. Plywood is flat, but the bamboo net is flexible
and can be shaped in many ways. But it’s a difficult
technology which was not popular at the time. It’s still not
popular, unfortunately; I wonder why.
 

1/

GL: Well, it seems that you wouldn’t be the first person to

have an approach which gives a strong formal expression,
with good economic logic. But then a client or a jury says,
“Even though I believe everything, I still think a flat
building has to be easier, and cheaper.”

SY: And safer.

GL: And safer. At a certain level, you can make all the
arguments, and still people go either with what they know
or what they think is common sense. Do you think the
computer helps the argument in any way?

SY: We have to prove it through time and experience. At

Toshodaiji temple, the elasticity of a wooden structure that
is thirteen-hundred years old is overlooked. Three times
we had renovations, and the last contractor still did not
know the real value of the elasticity of wood which
carpenters know. The carpenter told the academics and
the construction company, all of them with computers,
that he could fix the deformation and distortion of the
building without new materials. You might be surprised to
know that for Todaiji—the biggest wooden structure in the
world, with the Buddha inside, in Nara—they imported a
big steel truss from England to support the roof of the
Daibutsu temple. It’s still there, it’s publicized. It’s
pictured in a book. Nobody refused. Nobody opposed it.
I’m frustrated, as you say. The truss is rigid. It doesn’t
deform. Neither the truss nor the triangle—but a square
is always moving. It never stays the same; we can adjust it
and we can fix it. Nobody is paying attention to how the
buildings are today. If you have a dog, you ask him, “How
are you today?” But even to a house, we should ask:
“How are you today? Are you fine?”
— “I had a very hard
rain, so… it’s dripping or something.” (Laughs.) GL:
Speaking a little bit about tensile shells and tensile
models, is it important to you that the forces of a building
are visible in the final building? And if so, does the
computer play a role in that?

SY: Yes. Only the computer can display, from beginning to

end, the forces coming in and going out. That means,
dead or alive, the computer decides. It’s so fatal! We
never know; the calculation is done in a black box with a
program—it depends on the program. So structural
engineering is far more advanced with waves and
tremors… with finding frequencies against the typhoon
and the earthquake. You can simulate in many ways. So
we’re getting to know more and more about the forces
from outside, but we have to also be careful with people’s
hearts. There is this solidarity for sharing the space, the
enjoyment of space in the room—for eating, for playing.
That is design and aesthetics and ethics all combined,
and the computer can help us in many ways. The
computer also misleads, even when the computer is
following a function programmed by somebody. But the
architects should control the computer, and how to use it
and whether this is good or bad, too early or too late… We
will have an obligation to terminate the building, to break
it down like a nuclear power plant. We have to decide
before we build it, otherwise we have to ask somebody
else to rebuild it for the next generation and the next
generation. Like the Ise-Jingu Shrine. Every twenty years
they rebuild it again, sixty different times, doing the same
for 1,300 years, using the same kind of wood, cypress.
But it’s stupid to have all the columns in the earth—it’s
why they rot. But if the ground is wet, it will last long, like
in Holland. Or the buildings around Tokyo station; they
have pine tree piles to hold the buildings up. We don’t
have a hard ground as in New York. I don’t think they are
stupid. I respect the will of the people who continue the
same: Rebuilding the same building, with the same
materials, for such a long time. That’s the power of the
Japanese people; the traditions. But then the Pantheon
has been living two thousand years already.
The Galaxy Toyama Gymnasium is contained within Taikoyama Land, a large
park …
in the Toyama prefecture which hosts 23 public facili- ties and attractions,
including the observatory tower, a 32-metre wide hollow cube suspended over
the landscape that was also designed by Yoh. The gymnasium is used as a
multi-purpose space for sports, concerts and other events, with a capacity for
2,000 spectators. On the occasion of the First Japan Exposition at Taikoyama
Land in 1992, Yoh presented his two projects for the park: Galaxy Toyama
Gymnasium and the Prospecta observatory tower. The installation consisted
of models and printed panels of digital representations of the buildings.
Large abstract perspectives of the Galaxy Toyama roof, printed in acid green,
transmit the atmospheric quality of his work.

1/
Project Credits
Sports Complex, Odawara / Galaxy Toyama, Imizu
Client
Toyama Prefecture, (Taikoyama Land)
Architects
Shoei Yoh + Architects, Fukuoka
Design Principal
Shoei Yoh Hamura, Shoei Yoh + Architects
Project Team
Tetsuya Uekubo, Takumi Tsuji, Shoei Yoh + Architects
Collaborating Firm
Taiyo Kogyo Co., Dr. Kenshi Oda, 1984–96, Takanori
Yamagiwa, Akihiko Matugase, Ken-ichiro Matuzaki
Structural Advisor
Dr. Gengo Matsui, Waseda University
Structural Engineer
Motoshige Kusaba, Kusaba Architectural, Structure
Planning Office All materials from Shoei Yoh fonds, CCA

Series concept
CCA Publications and Linked by Air
Editor
Greg Lynn
Editorial coordination
Jesse Seegers
Text editing and proofreading
Victoria Bugge Oeye

Kari Rittenbach

Katie Moore
Transcription
Christiane Côté
Rights and Reproductions
Marc Pitre
Design and development
Linked by Air

The CCA is an international research centre and museum

founded on the conviction that architecture is a public
concern. Based on its extensive collection, exhibitions,
programs and research opportunities the CCA is a leading
voice in advancing knowledge, promoting public
understanding, and widening thought and debate on
architecture, its history, theory, practice, and role in
society today.
Board of Trustees
Phyllis Lambert, Founding Director Emeritus
Bruce Kuwabara, Chair

Pierre-André Themens, Vice-Chair

Stephen R. Bronfman
Jean-Louis Cohen
Sylvia Lavin
Frederick Lowy
Charles E. Pierce, Jr.
Gerald Sheff
Mirko Zardini The Oral History project launched by the
CCA to document the different phases of Archaeology of
the Digital has been supported by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey
Brown. The CCA would also like to thank Hydro-Québec,
the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications, the
Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts de
Montréal.

© 2014 Canadian Centre for Architecture

ISBN 978-1-927071-08-3

Published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture

1920 rue Baile

Montréal, Québec

Canada H3H 2S6

www.cca.qc.ca


A Gymnasium in southern Japan designed by Shoei Yoh and built in

1988. 63 by 47 meters in plan, its roof is a space frame composed of
solid cedar wood struts of varying thicknesses, with uniform metal
nodes.

Founded in Berlin in 1928, MERO is an abbreviation of

Mengeringhausen Rohrbauweise (Mengeringhausen’s tubular
structures), which uses hollow steel tubes connected to steel nodes. The
first MERO roof structure calculated with the aid of computers was first
built in 1974.

An automobile produce between 1908 and 1927 using mass-produced

parts in an assembly line production instead of individually handcrafted.
Henry Ford wrote of the Model-T in his autobiography: “I will build a car
for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small
enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the
best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs
that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no
man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with
his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”

Building in Rome notable for its dome with a diameter of 43.3 meters
and an oculus at the top which is open to the sky and provides the
building’s main source of natural light.

A café in Fukuoka, Japan completed in 1977, about which Yoh writes

“At twilight we can see both inside and out. Equilibrium of transparency
is found twice a day. Sunrise and sunset. This discovery starts giving me
a sense of the Time Process of a day’s performance.”

An American aeronautical inventor who founded a company called

AeroVironment and designed human-powered aircrafts. His plane
Gossamer Condor was built out of aluminium tubing, plastic foam, piano
wire, bicycle parts, and mylar foil.

Established by industrialist Henry Kremer in 1959 and administered by

the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Human Powered Aircraft Group, the
Kremer prize is a £50,000 prize for the first human-powered aircraft to
fly a figure-eight around two markers a half-mile apart. The first prize
was only won by Paul MacCready in 1977, and then a second time in
1979, when Bryan Allen flew the also-human-powered Gossamer
Albatross from England to France.
A German Architect and Structural Engineer, known for tensile,
lightweight, and membrane structures, who founded the Institute for
Lightweight Structures at the University of Stuttgart in 1964.

A building by Norman Foster and Partners completed in 1982 for the

French car maker Renault’s main UK Distribution facility in Swindon,
UK. Characterised by bright yellow painted tubular masts and slender
arched steel beams and tensions rods

A 44-story building by Foster and Associates for HSBC completed in

1985. Robert Hughes noted in TIME magazine that its “open ground
floor level has become a Sunday gathering spot for Hong Kong’s Filipina
maids.”

A region located near the center of the Japan Sea Coast the Western
Coast of central Japan, it also contains one of the three greatest
Dinosaur Museums in the world.

Overhanging edge of a building’s roof that serves to keep rain away from
exterior walls as well as provide sun shading. Eaves is both the singular
and plural form of the word.

The Palau Sant Jordi stadium was built for the 1992 Olympics, notable
for a 128 x 106 meter space frame dome 44 meters high (almost the
same as the Pantheon in Rome).

One of the first air-supported cable membrane roof structure, 80 meters

wide by 140 meters long, designed by architecture firm Davis Brody
Bond, in consultation with Engineer David Geiger, for the 1970 World
Expo in Osaka.

A Buddhist temple in the Nara Prefecture, completed in 759. Its

wooden structure has undergone restoration in 1270, 1323, 1693-94,
1898-99, and 2000-2009, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage site
since 1998.

The Japanese term for “giant Buddha.”

A Shinto shrine complex in Mie prefecture, two buildings of which are
rebuilt every twenty years (a process called Sengu) as part of the
religious belief in the impermanence of all things (wabi-sabi) and the
death and renewal of nature.
true
Shoei Yoh
1. Archaeology of the Digital 03