Pritzker Prize laureate, Japanese architect Toyo Ito has designed a tree-like structural columns with integrated overhead natural skylight for the new College of Social Sciences at the National Taiwan University main campus. Perfectly displaying a careful use and manipulation of light and space. Ito’s interconnected spaces ensure a smooth navigation and vital communal spaces, for a community-orientated building. In a nod to the analog form of books, Ito intended to encourage encounters and interactions between students in the Library, where the exchange of knowledge and information remains key.

Known for creating conceptual architecture that seeks expression of both the physical and virtual worlds, Ito drew inspiration from natural elements, designing a building that connected with the ecological environment and its local society. The building’s defining architectural gesture is a system of tree-like structural columns integrated with overhead natural skylights, carefully deployed across the new campus facility. The result is a precise manipulation of light and space that gives the interior an unmistakably organic quality. Rather than asserting the rigid geometry typical of institutional buildings, Ito allowed the structural logic itself to carry the expressive weight of the design — columns branching and spreading overhead like a canopy, dissolving the boundary between built structure and natural form.

The building rises eight stories with two basement levels, sitting on a site area of over 869,000 square metres with a total floor area of more than 53,000 square metres, constructed in reinforced concrete and steel frame. The scale is considerable, yet the interior never reads as monumental — a testament to how deftly Ito manages proportion and the diffusion of natural light.

National Taiwan University
1 Roosevelt Rd
Taipei, Taiwan