The dominant image of contemporary architecture in Japan is one of serene simplicity: spaces that are light, bright and weightless, in which structure and materiality are reduced to the minimum.
The ethereal works of the architectural firm SANAA, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, are the best known examples of this tendency, which holds a large number of younger architects, both here and abroad, in its thrall. But the true father of this approach is Toyo Ito, Sejima's early mentor.
Ito spent the last decades of the 20th century exploring the idea of an architecture for the "virtual" body -- the parallel self that lives on the incessant diet of electronic information in the modern metropolis. He once famously said that contemporary man was a "Tarzan who lives in a forest of media," and his architecture should be a form of "media-clothing."