For us, there were two related reasons for visiting the art island of Naoshima:
- To experience the art installations there, amid the natural island setting.
- To experience numerous buildings designed by the famous minimalist Japanese architect, Tadao Ando.
Today, we’ll talk about Mr Ando. He has been a force of (architectural) nature for many decades, in Japan and around the world.
Tadao Ando was born in 1941 in Osaka, Japan, and first studied as a boxer and a fighter, while living with his great grandmother. While on a high school trip to Tokyo, the young Ando stumbled across Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, and he was instantly struck by the power of architecture. Less than two years after graduating from high school, he ended his boxing career in order to pursue architecture.
He studied drawing and interior design in night school courses before travelling to experience the architectural masterworks of architects like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, and Le Corbusier (whom he would famously name his dog after). Though never formally taught as an architect, Ando returned to Osaka in 1968 and established Tadao Ando Architects and Associates.
Heavily influenced by Japanese simplicity, Ando’s style is characterised by an emphasis on negative space and spatial circulation. With a mindful approach that allows for a holistic, almost spiritual experience within his structures, Ando incorporates Zen concepts into his work, focusing on simplicity and inward feelings rather than outward appearances.
(source)
I’ve met him twice during my career. (This is David talking!) One time I was with a client in Tokyo. This client was interested in hiring Ando for a project. We rendezvoused with Ando in a shopping mall in central Tokyo. After the brief meeting (all in Japanese, which I can’t understand), we walked with Ando through the big volume of the shopping center, down escalators, to the street level. All along the way, quite a few local folks, who happened to be in the mall at the time, came up to Ando to complement him and get autographs. He’s an architectural rock star in Japan.
Years later, in Hawaii at the architecture firm where I was a principal, we — a colleague and I — had a new client who was a Japanese developer. This developer wanted to turn a large land parcel on the Big Island into a collection of very high-end villas, and they wanted Tadao Ando to design them. We were hired as the Hawaii-based architect for the project. Ando and an associate came to Hawaii to see the land and meet with us. Everyone was very polite.
After returning to Japan, Ando and his office prepared a single design for a grand spare minimalist villa. Per his unwavering signature approach, concrete, stone, glass, and water were the only materials. His vision was for a gathering of a few dozen identical villas on the lava hillside above the road and the ocean. Such a scattering of rigid and modern buildings does not have precedent in Hawaii. We, from Hawaii, were certain that this design would never make it through a public approval process; nor, really, should it. But the client — developer and boutique leisure property manager — was convinced that the pedigree of Tadao Ando designs would attract wealthy international buyers.
The developer ultimately vanished without explanation and without complete payment. We wondered how many ambitious clients seek out Ando for his cachet, with golden concrete in their eyes.
Nonetheless, the pure forms of Ando’s most-published works are honey to buzzing architects around the world. Partially for the sublimely pure forms and volumes; partially for the respect for a designer whose work seems so uncompromised compared to the earthbound world most architects work in.
Me included.
There’s a little introduction to Ando in the village of Honmura on Naoshima Island: The Ando Museum. It’s actually an interior intervention in a 100-year-old traditional wooden house, designed by Ando himself.
In Ando’s own words:
In the ANDO MUSEUM, I nestled a concrete box within the old minka house. The box has a gently curved ceiling. One of its walls aligns with the main axis of the house and is tilted towards the ridge- beam to generate a feeling of openness that extends dynamically into the space above. Sunlight descends down through the deep space from a skylight opening at the top of the wooden roof. My aim was to create a space that conjures a rich sense of depth despite its small size, where oppositional elements such as the past and present, wood and concrete, and light and shadow clash intensely as they are superimposed against each other. (source)
He works with the same materials and forms wherever he’s invited. The contrast between the traditional wood construction and the modern concrete planes invites contemplation; but is it perhaps jamming a running idea into a fragile box?
We also visited the Lee Ufan Museum, again designed by Ando.
From the museum’s web site:
A museum resulting from the collaboration between internationally acclaimed artist Lee Ufan, presently based mainly in Europe, and architect Tadao Ando. The Ando-designed semi-underground structure houses paintings and sculptures by Lee spanning a period from the 1970s to the present day. Lee’s works resonate with Ando’s architecture, giving visitors an impression of both stillness and dynamism. Located in a gentle valley surrounded by hills and the ocean, the museum offers a tranquil space where nature, architecture and art come in resonance with each other, inviting to peaceful and quiet contemplation, in a society overflowing with material goods. (source)
The forms are simple and dramatic, again all about juxtaposition of hard concrete lines with soft nature. We start to see how, whatever your feelings about Ando’s design, you are always somehow attending to it like an emperor; rather than the other way around.
Thanks to our friends, we were able to spend some time at the Benesse House Museum, and a night in the Benesse House Oval. Ando designed the entire museum-hotel complex atop and in a hill overlooking the Seto Inland Sea.
Benesse House Museum opened in 1992 as a facility integrating a museum with a hotel, based on the concept of “coexistence of nature, art and architecture.” Designed by Tadao Ando, the facility is built on high ground overlooking the Seto Inland Sea and features large apertures that serve to open up the interior to the splendid natural surroundings. In addition to exhibiting the painting, sculpture, photography, and installations in its collection, the Museum also contains permanent site-specific installations that artists have created especially for the building, selecting locations on their own and designing the works for those spaces. The Museum’s artworks are found not just within its galleries, but in all parts of the building, as well as in scattered locations along the seashore that borders the complex and in the nearby forest. Benesse House Museum is truly a rare site where nature, art, and architecture come together, in an environment containing numerous site-specific works created for the natural environs of Naoshima or inspired by the architectural spaces they inhabit. (source)
The museum building offers quite a few large contemporary art installations, along with a café and gift shop. Ando’s unadorned clean hard volumes are perfect for displaying art. Although sometimes the museum space is more the art than the art.
While we strolled through the museum, our friends told us a bit about their experience having Ando as their architect. They knew what they were getting into, so they weren’t complaining. Ando’s reputation as an visionary (uncompromising?) designer preceded him. Our friends experienced him as gracious as well as supremely confident in his approach.
He was — and is — unwavering about the quality of his signature concrete walls. Achieving Ando’s standards of smoothness and precision requires a special high-pressure forming. The pressure can be so high that the forms burst. There’s nothing to do in that case but start over. Which was what was needed in our friend’s project.
Ando values crisp straight edges and lines. That means that the outside corners of his concrete walls can be sharp like knives. So sharp that people cut their fingers on the corners. At our friends’ building as well as here at Benesse, Ando compromised (perhaps reluctantly) to allow chamfers on corners where people would touch the walls. But that isn’t his preferred look.
Much to our surprise, our friends said that Ando is enamored of pairs of things. We started to look around the museum, and we found pairs and couples and doubles everywhere. Our friends said that, in many cases, one of the pair is there only to complete the duo, not for any functional purpose. Tyranny of a vision, or aesthetic delight?
One of the loveliest parts of this visit was spending the night at The Oval. The Oval is a pavilion of eight rooms, ensconced above the Benesse Museum building.
Our only access to The Oval was via a private funicular monorail! It clangingly crawled up and down the hill, revealing lovely views, and giving us enough time to marvel at the experience of “our own” private monorail.
The joy of The Oval is, well, the oval central space. This space is filled with a still reflecting pool and opens to the sky. Turquoise doors are the only indication of the hotel rooms.
(This turquoise is very unusual; Ando’s designs never have any color. During the design process for our friends’ project, our friends asked for some color to brighten things up. Ando’s response: Concrete, glass, wood – that’s all you need.)
This serene space captures and calms you. And puts you in the middle of an ethereal sculpture.
Curiously, the hotel rooms themselves are ordinary. They’re spacious and comfortable, but completely international. We had enjoyed a few beautiful traditional hotels in the days preceding this Ando pilgrimage, so the clean blandness of the rooms surprised us. Clearly the overall form of the accommodation pavilion was the point, much more than the architectural experience of the guest once they retired.
But the view from the room’s terrace was gorgeous.
When a member of the hotel staff showed us our room, she cautioned us that there were no privacy screens between each room’s outside terrace. The Architect had not allowed such things to compromise the purity of the architectural form.
A consistent power of Ando’s designs is stimulating relationships between hard concrete walls, platonic spatial volumes, and the natural environment all around. But these pure forms and their spatial drama don’t necessarily lead to ease of use. When we’d first arrived at the museum hotel, a hotel staff member showed us to the monorail and escorted us up to The Oval. She explained how, later, after dinner, when the museum proper was closed, we would call and manage the monorail ourselves.
That evening, we enjoyed a lovely dinner of wine and many courses in the hotel’s restaurant, which sits a few hundred meters down the hill from the museum and hotel proper. (See below, in Just One More Bite.) After dinner, we strolled back up the hill and into the deserted museum. We headed up the curving ramp to where we thought the monorail was. Except it wasn’t there.
There were no helpful little signs. After a bit of amused inspection down little corridors and around little walls, we found the access door. We think something as prosaic as access to the hotel rooms wasn’t terribly important to the Architect. But maybe that’s the wine talking?
No matter what the experience of each Ando-designed building and place may be, we can’t deny the clarity and consistency of his vision. It’s extraordinary that Ando has honed his design approach and vocabulary and stayed loyal to it over his entire life. Perhaps he found his brand early on and stuck with it. It’s a powerful moving challenging beautiful brand.
A little breakfast at Benesse House.
A beautiful dinner at the main Benesse House restaurant.
October 2023