what can be achieved from that nothingness.

April 26, 2018 7:18 PM

Architect Tadao Ando (born 13 September 1941) is highly regarded for his unparalleled work with concrete, sensitive treatment of natural light, and strong engagement with nature.
posted by spaceburglar (9 comments total)

I love Ando's work! I used to hang out at Galleria Akka in Osaka whenever I could when I lived in Kansai. Once I visited Church of the Light on a weekday and spent a magical hour alone in the space, experimenting with the ~7sec echo.

The Chikatsu-Asuka Historical Museum is a really unique and eerie space. It's a museum about the ancient kofun - keyhole-shaped burial mounds in the Kansai area. The main exhibition room is right under the square tower sticking up from the main stairway volume. When you're in that room the acoustics are really weird and you feel this sense of cavernous underground *space*. The room is big and already has a high ceiling, but then you look up at the ceiling and you realize that tower you saw from the outside is hollow and you're staring up into 4-5 stories of utter darkness.

Tadao Ando is a poet of concrete.
posted by technodelic at 7:43 PM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

I visited the Church of Light - and it was profound experience, even as a non-Christian. It was much smaller and humbler than I expected - but that made it all the more powerful. The cross as simple plans of glass. A window, that encompasses everything and yet is nothing. The beautiful void through which you see a bigger existence. It was incredible.
posted by helmutdog at 8:16 PM on April 26, 2018

Wow that Buddha statue in Sapporo is amazing. That last link is gorgeous!

Some of his work reminds me or the Mexico City architecture in Total Recall.

Thanks for posting!
posted by St. Peepsburg at 12:07 AM on April 27, 2018

I live near the Eychaner House. It is pretty polarizing in the neighborhood being the only brutalist house on a street of more typical brown and redstone Chicago homes and buildings (and just one house over from a place with an outsider art vibe with wine bottles and junk incorporated into a brick wall.

It's a bit frustrating because it presents nothing to the street at all. Just a solid wall unadorned except for a featureless door. It's also rather poorly documented because Fred Eychaner, despite being the owner of a media business, is incredibly private so there are next to no photos of the interior. The best images I have seen are renderings not photos. The only reason I know anything about it all is because he is a major democratic party donation bundler and hosts dinners at the house with guests like Michele Obama or Hillary Clinton so the secret service, state and city police secure the surrounding blocks which made me curious about it. I caught a glimpse in from the back once when the garage door was open. I still didn't see much.

[I will say the male donors to the fundraisers are shockingly bad dressers for people who drop thousands on dinners with big name politicos. Very little evidence of tailoring from the men who were queued up to get in.]
posted by srboisvert at 5:23 AM on April 27, 2018

I bow to no one in my love of brutalism, but it brought me up pretty short to realize that what plays as daringly forward architecture overseas is really only the massive and sustained subsidy of the Japanese concrete industry. (See, for example, the lonely, echoing prefectural museum nearly every prefecture in Japan has ponied up for, invariably made of sculptural poured concrete, and just as invariably built to no discernible point, for no evident audience, simply as a way of shunting public monies to politically-connected partners in the construction trades.)

For all his mastery of the form, Ando is not exempt from criticism on such grounds, and in particular, I regard his willingness to work on the Mori Omotesando Hills project — replacing the iconic Dojunkai Aoyama Apartments — as nothing less than complicity in historic erasure.
posted by adamgreenfield at 7:09 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

There's a building of his about 10 minutes from my house, in the university my sister went to. It's not a style I love (so much concrete!) but it was really interesting to see it being built, since the whole internal structure was made of steel in really weird shapes. Did not expect the finished thing to look so impressive.

I'm not really sure but I heard a rumor he also designed a house for my first boss (from when I was a teenager).

Also, the second link led me to this book about Ando and if you could zoom in on the cover picture, you'd be able to see my house!
posted by CrazyLemonade at 8:22 AM on April 27, 2018

Oh I just did some googling and yep, this is the house, I can see my former boss' wife in one of the pics.
posted by CrazyLemonade at 8:24 AM on April 27, 2018

The most interesting thing to me about his work in concrete are the form ties -- those circular impressions left in the concrete. Witold Rybczynski wrote a short but interesting article on what they are and how different architects have treated them over time. The whole thing is worth a read, but I found this section at the end particularly interesting:

"Ando, who admired Kahn, also revived the form-tie detail. It is plainly visible in the Fort Worth Art Museum. What is not obvious is that since fewer ties are now required, only some of the holes are real ties—the rest are counterfeit."
posted by HiddenInput at 12:07 PM on April 27, 2018

I think the only Ando building I've seen is the Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima - but the relationship between the building itself and the art within it made a tremendous impression on me; it's my favourite art museum anywhere. So I just went looking to see if there were any of his buildings in the UK, and... well, there was, but... Looks as if there's a water feature in Mayfair that I should go and check out, though.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 6:36 AM on April 28, 2018