Tadao Ando - Style

Style

Ando has strong culture backgrounds in Japan, where he was raised and also currently lives. Japanese religion and style of life strongly influenced his architecture and design. Ando's architectural style is said to create a "haiku" effect, emphasizing nothingness and empty space to represent the beauty of simplicity. He favors designing complex spatial circulation while maintaining the appearance of simplicity. As a self-taught architect, he keeps his Japanese culture and language tightly in his mind while he travels around Europe for learning experience. As an architect, he believes that architecture can change the society--"to change the dwelling is to change the city and to reform society". "Reform society" could be a promotion of a place or a change of the identity of that place. According to Werner Blaser, "Good buildings by Tadao Ando create memorable identity and therefore publicity, which in turn attracts the public and promotes market penetration".

The simplicity of his architecture emphasizes the concept of sensation and physical experiences, mainly influenced by the Japanese culture. The religious term, Zen, focuses on the concept of simplicity and concentrates on the inner feeling rather than the appearance. The theory has vividly shown on Ando’s work and definitely become his style that distinguishes other outstanding architects in the world. In order to practice the idea of simplicity, Ando’s architecture is mostly constructed with concrete, which provides his architecture a sense of cleanness and weightiness at the same time. Due to the simplicity of the exterior, the construction and organization of the space are relatively potential in order to represents the aesthetic from sensation.

Unlike most of the religious architecture that mainly focusing on the preservation of history, one of his works, the Komyo-ji Temple in Saijo, Ehime, is made out of wood, which requires maintenance and repair on a regular basis. However, in the perspective of Japanese culture, the most significant concept of the shrine is to be able to spread the divine spirit from the interior and being able to eternalize it through the architecture. Besides Japanese religious architecture, Ando also designs Christian Churches, such as the Church of Light (1989) and the Church in Tarumi (1993). Although there are different characteristic between Japanese and Christian churches, Ando treats them with the similar strategy. In fact, there should be no difference for designing religious architecture and houses. He explains, “we do not need to differentiate one from the other. Dwelling in a house is not only a functional issue, but also a spiritual one. The house is the locus of mind (kokoro), and the mind is the locus of god. Dwelling in a house is a search for the mind (kokoro) as the locus of god, just as one goes to church to search for god. An important role of the church is to enhance this sense of the spiritual. In a spiritual place, people find peace in their mind (kokoro), as in their homeland”. Besides speaking the spirit of the architecture, the association between the nature and the architecture is also his architecture strategy. As an architect, Ando makes his architecture become a way for people to easily experience the spirit and the beauty of the nature through the architecture. He thinks architecture is responsible for performing the attitude of the site and then turning it into visible perceptions. This not only represents his theory of the role of architecture in the society but also shows the reason that he spends so much time studying architecture from his physical experience.

In 1995, Ando won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the highest distinction in the field of architecture. He donated the $100,000 prize money to the orphans of the 1995 Kobe earthquake.