The fictional film will be set in a public restroom that is part of the real-life urban renewal project known as the “The Tokyo Toilet project", which involves the creation of 17 public bathrooms in key locations in the Japanese capital with designs by world renowned Japanese architects, such as Tadao Ando and Sou Fujimoto.

Wenders said he was inspired by the futuristic look and unique cultural spirit of the project and decided to set his forthcoming untitled film inside one of them. — The Hollywood Reporter

Freed from the conventions of architecture and construction, what would this world look like?

It’s a question Japanese architect Junya Ishigami has been trying to answer for the past decade, dreaming of structures that are as light as a cloud, as vast as the sky, as random as the trees in a forest or the stars in the sky. — The Guardian

Many local architects complain that these high-end follies are not serious architecture, but gimmicky flash. In many cases they are right. But that’s O.K. Form, as any architect will learn, follows function. In this case it’s selling a name and a mystique. — NYT

Wood latticework, green shrubbery, sunken sports fields and temple-like touches can be seen in the two final design proposals for Tokyo’s controversial new Olympic Stadium. [...] The new proposals [...] are more understated in style and also smaller in physical form compared to the originally commissioned design. [...]

The agency has not named the firms behind the two final designs, although unconfirmed local media reports stated that they were Kengo Kuma and Toyo Ito [...]. — telegraph.co.uk

In an era when many architects are acclaimed for impressive rhetoric or jaw-dropping computer renderings — or both — [Ito] has earned his following in purely architectural terms. He knows how to build, to shape space in a way that respects traditional craftsmanship and seems utterly contemporary. [...]

That odd and productive co-dependence of design and place, architect and site, is a relationship that doesn't really exist in any other art form. — latimes.com

“They don’t want a foreigner to build in Tokyo for a national stadium. On the other hand, they all have work abroad. Whether it’s Sejima, Toyo Ito, or Maki or Isozaki or Kengo Kuma.”

Last month Isozaki, 83, wrote an open letter to the Japan Sports Council, the government body in charge of plans for the 2020 Games, in which he attacked the “distorted” process that has led to “a dull, slow form”. — theguardian.com

A Mexican federal agency has denied the environmental permit to allow the construction of the $105m International Baroque Museum in Puebla, less than a month after the groundbreaking ceremony.

The project, designed by the Japanese architect and 2013 Pritzker Prize-winner Toyo Ito, was deemed “not applicable” by Semarnat’s (the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources) General Directorate of Environmental Impact and Risk. — theartnewspaper.com

Our way of life is still based in twentieth-century ideas, specifically a modernist philosophy that assumes we can use science and technology to conquer nature. So we try to isolate ourselves from nature; our cities are completely segregated from the environment. [...] That kind of modernist thinking has reached its limit. — artforum.com

Earlier this year in March, it was announced that Japanese architect Toyo Ito would join the ranks of the architecture Gods and be honored with the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Last night now at a festive ceremony in Boston's John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, he finally received his coveted medal and $100,000 grant from Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation which has sponsored the prize since its founding in 1979. — bustler.net