Pao for the Tokyo Nomad Girl #Toyo Ito

The relationship between house and furniture in Toyo Ito’s architecture is made explicit by the “Pao for the Tokyo Nomad Girl”. In this installation, made of a translucent tent where a girl makes herself up, listens to music or has a tea, furniture becomes the main issue of the design by means of becoming architecture. The idea of a dwelling as an architectural object with a recognisable shape and as an interior is no longer the aim. The important thing is now the furniture or devises that are the environment where the nomad girl lives.

The house gets shattered outwards, giving up its functions up to premises throughout the city, and inwards, handing over the prominent role of the spaces to the devices. The objects that were designed for the pao, as well as the pao itself, reflect the features of the city where they are: independence, fragmentation and lightness.

They were all transient objects like mirage without the feeling of texture or existence. They are ephemeral objects which are more of spontaneous phenomena like a rainbow than structures. Toyo Ito, Architecture in a simulated city, december 1991

The shift of the house towards the objects reflects a change in the ways of living in contemporary Japan: the customer of the traditional house is a family, while the House for the Nomad Girl is aimed to a sole isolated individual such as the girl “that wanders around the immense plain of the media called Toyo.”