Sendai Mediatheque

UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design
Spring 2014 100B
Critic Ajay Manthripragada

The Sendai Mediatheque by Toyo Ito is celebrated internationally for its visual elegance and radical structural solutions. The extent of the investigation began with an interest in the building’s earthquake resistance after the Sendai earthquake. This precedent study is an unrolled elevation with overlaid plans of the tube structure mapped to a corresponding floor to determine the movement of the tubes.For the physical model of the precedent study, fishing wire was used as the vertical component to determine the movement of the tube structure, and the horizontal component of the floorplate structure was lasercut on plexiglass.