Determinant Yuuki Yang

Toyo Ito recounts in ‘White U’ (Anyone), how his sister had just lost a member of her family and the center of her life. At that moment she desperately needed a spiritual anchor that could hold her pain and be a utopian existence for her isolation.

Based on this background, the White U was realised for protection. It was unique that it not only cut off the outside world but also contained an isolated courtyard. Ito’s sister relied on ‘the tube’ – an affectionate name for the house form to share the sense of being a family. She loved the closeness. As time went by, and the children grew up, they all came to be repulsed by the closed form and wished to escape. In the end, the house faced the fate of being demolished.

This change in the mentality of the sister determines the length of time that the White U has existed in the world. When the sister no longer needed the protection of the U house, it lost the value of being a container of life as well. In the end they did not wish anyone else to live there.

In the lecture ‘The Art of Forgetting’, Adrian Forty mentions the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart that was completed in 1984. The new building introduced a set of motifs that had not been seen in German architecture since the Third Reich: the rotonda, sunken columns, columns with simplified capitals, large amounts of travertine and sandstone. So it even caused certain amounts of disturbance in German architecture and created a great deal of discourse. I thought the building that made such achievements would survive for a long time, but in fact, it has been gradually forgotten after only 15 years.

It seems that no matter how valuable the building itself is or how rich and novel the elements are, it will not be the decisive factor for remembrance. Same as White U, we are hold terror to maintain the exist of Antoun. Each member was in this terror while relying on it for a semester. For now, it’s time to leave ‘the tube’.