TOYO ITO DOESN'T hate straight lines. The award-winning architect, who last year won the competition to design Taiwan's Taichung Opera House, due for completion in 2009, just prefers curved ones.
'I have liked curved lines since I was a child,' says the 65-year old. 'It's a bit like my character. When I talk, when I think - it's not in straight lines. It's a bit curved, it's soft. And in a way it resembles my inner character.'
The plans and a large detailed model of the Taichung Opera House, on display as part of an exhibition in Tokyo to recognise Ito's achievements, show his affinity for complex, curved spaces. But he says the project's complexity grew out of simplicity.
Just like Norman Foster's so-called Gherkin building in London, its exterior shape - rectangular pierced by large, curved shapes - reminds many people of something far more delicious: an extremely large chunk of cheese - a notion that Ito finds amusing, if misleading.
'When you look at a cheese, the holes are all compartments,' says the architect behind the Tod's building in Aoyama, Tokyo. 'They don't go through. But in this building, it's the opposite. All the holes go through, like in a cave. There's a continuity. And, if you think about the human body as well, from the mouth all the way down to the ass, there's a continuity. That's also a cave.' Such comments invoke the spirit of Tubism, a little-known movement that was forgotten almost as soon as it was launched in the 1980s. The Tubists, who included writer Takashi Hasegawa, poet Shuntaro Tanigawa, and literary critic Ai Maeda, saw their movement as the polar opposite of the geometrical analysis and dissection epitomised by Cubism. Rejecting the reduction of things to geometric forms, they instead tried to perceive them as tubular systems involved in a process. For example, whereas Cubism would reduce a tree to cylinders and cones, Tubism emphasised the tubular connections between roots, trunk, branches, and leaves. In the same way, an animal was best understood as a tubular digestive track, with other tubular systems for breathing and blood circulation.
Initially intended as an aesthetic system, Tubism got little response from contemporary artists, but its appeal to a later system of architecture seeking to escape the de facto cubism of the modernist cityscape is obvious.
'I'm very aware of that movement,' Ito says. 'But in my case I'd prefer to put more emphasis on the tubes existing as part a network. I guess you could call me a Neo-Tubist.'