Albert Ferre Books

The fourth issue of Verb looks at two related the conditioning of architectural environments and the conditioning of behaviors. On the one hand, studies of luminosity, sound, atmosphere and temperature expand the range of techniques available to the discipline, allowing the production of ever more extensive effects with increasingly minimal means. On the other, the rise of commerce, theming and the manufacturing of identity produce a different set of effects, directing users and their emotions for maximum financial success. What are the real potentials of conditioning? Do these new environments merely replicate the existing with increasing accuracy and sophistication, or can they generate qualitatively new atmospheres capable of stimulating not just new effects but also new forms of living? Featured The Venetian in Las Vegas, Spanish Pavilion in Aichi by FOA, New Milan Trade Fair by Fuksas, Arup SoundLab, Décosterd & Rahm, Arakawa + Gins, Enric Ruiz, Tomihiro Museum by Makoto Yokomizo, and texts by Norman Klein and AUDC.

Calling him a "creator of timeless buildings," the Pritzker Jury further praised Ito for "infusing his designs with a spiritual dimension and for the poetics that transcend all his works." Among those works, the Jury singled out his Sendai Mediatheque, whose innovative use of structural tubes "permitted new interior spatial qualities."The book Sendai Mediatheque presents the process of design and construction of Ito's prototype during the six years between the building's initial design through to its completion in 2001. The Mediatheque aspires to integrate real and virtual worlds - or, in Ito's words, "the primitive body of natural flow and the virtual body of electronic flow". Long after its completion, the Mediatheque is still evolving as an evolutionary building that combines the virtual and real into one design objective.