... why we architecture obsessives will travel so far, to see a lone building or two. That odd, productive co-dependence of design and place ...
Since the economic crisis of 2008, there's been a substantial backlash against the idea that critics should write exclusively, or even mostly, about stand-alone buildings by prominent architects. We've found broader and more complex ways to explore the relationship between architecture and society. The culture of "starchitecture," that overused if sometimes bluntly effective term, has lost its luster.
But we make an exception for Ito, who won the Pritzker Prize, the field's top honor, in 2013. One of the deans (with Arata Isozaki and Tadao Ando) of Japanese architecture, he is, at 73, one of the few designers who can make a critic drop everything to get on a plane to see one solitary building in some remote part of the world.
