Pianta e viste del Toyota Bridge, realizzato da Kurokawa per collegare Nagoya City a Toyota City. Plan and views of the Toyota Bridge, designed by Kurokawa as a link between the city of Nagoya and Toyota City.
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oyota is not only the logo of one of the largest automobile companies in the world, it is also the name of a city with a population of 350,000, an hour’s drive from a major city, Nagoya. The urban center was built toward the end of the thirties to host a community destined to work in automobile production and services. The Toyota Bridge therefore, represents an additional feather in Toyota City’s cap, creating an important link between the city and the surrounding area. Set up like a giant animal-shaped structure that reminds the onlooker of some mysterious prehistoric animal’s skeleton, the Toyota Bridge’s layout favors pedestrian traffic, distributing two ten meter-wide walkways on both sides of the structure. In spite of the fact that the bridge rises in the largest automobile city in the world, there was a
strong desire to give man his own space. This attitude explains how Kurokawa’s design poetic always places the relationship between man and architecture at the center of his works. The father, together with Kiyonori Kikutake, of Metabolism, a movement that emerged around the time of the World Design Conference held in Tokyo in 1959, Kurokawa has never ceased searching for functions and forms inside his architecture that are inspired by nature and its vital processes searching for a balance between urban space and existential area. In this Japanese master, the metabolist’s desire – which is so typical of him – for working eternally to blend the natural and the artificial has never waned with the passing of time. This is especially true when it comes to building architectural constructions of great symbolic intensity such as the bridge, which represents man’s eternal desire to