Product Description

Philippe Starck describes him as a "mystic in a country which is no longer mystic." Drew Philip calls his buildings "land art" that "struggle to emerge from the earth." He is the only architect to have won the discipline's four most prestigious prizes: the Pritzker, Carlsberg, Praemium Imperiale, and Kyoto Prize. His name is Tadao Ando, and he is one of the world's greatest living architects. Combining influences from Japanese tradition with the best of Modernism, Ando has developed a completely unique building aesthetic that makes use of concrete, wood, water, light, space, and nature in a way that has never been witnessed elsewhere in architecture. This book provides the perfect introduction to Ando's work, including private homes, churches, museums, apartment complexes, and cultural spaces throughout Japan, and in France, Italy, Spain, and the USA.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24225 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

About the Author
Masao Furuyama studied architecture at Kyoto University and received his doctorate in urban engineering from Tokyo University. He has taught at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, where he has been Vice-President since 2004, and published on the subjects of architecture and Tadao Ando.

Customer Reviews

The Beauty of Absence
The slim volume of less than one hundred pages and small format is in a way in harmony with the minimalist aesthetics of the charismatic architect. The book is a distillate of beauty.

The exquisite colour photographs display the magic of the spare aesthetics, elegance and strength of Ando's buildings and surrounding landscape. The accompanying text is succinct and incisive and does justice to the architect and its creations through dissecting and providing a penetrating analysis of the elements that characterize Ando's architecture and individual buildings.

In all, nineteen projects are presented covering a broad spectrum of Ando's work comprising houses, apartment buildings, churches, temples, museums, art foundations, the Japan pavilion expo '92 and the Meditation Space, Unesco.

Three are the primary characteristics in Ando's architecture: the geometry of walls, the geometry of sky and elements derived from the Japanese minimalist aesthetics.

Ando's architecture is an architecture of walls e.g. a freestanding wall, an angled wall piercing a concrete cube or a wall, bisected horizontally, encircling an inner courtyard like a medieval rampart.

Ando employs a limited range of materials and expresses their naked textures. His choice of materials gives his work its characteristic ascetism and tension. His buildings convey a feeling of purity, beauty and strength.

Ando though a master of poured concrete, still relies on natural materials for points that a human being may touch. He invariably uses natural wood for floors, doors, and furniture. As natural materials decay, they become repositories for memory.

Nature, especially the sky, plays a crucial role in Ando's architecture. He abstracts it to his purposes. In order to elude architecture's fundamental nature as a closed-off box, he relies on the sky as the natural element which most affects architectural interiors. In Ando's architecture, the sky is a crucial spatial-structural element. The interplay of light and shadow created by a sharply delineated sky and the three-dimensional forms expressed in concrete walls generate a special fascination in Ando's architecture.

The interlocking relationship between site, structure and empty space provides a formula for bringing a confined area to life.

Ando's architecture is simple, strong and gentle. It joins simplicity of form to complexity of space. It uses naked materials delicate to the touch. Ando's architecture is considered the culmination of Japanese aesthetics. Because the place of nothing is the essence of Japanese culture. A container of aesthetic emotions.

What Ando's buildings always communicate to us is the conviction that architecture is able to give order to the world only when it is based on strong emotions, and the faith that strong emotions are born only by taking up challenges and prevailing. Beauty is not the goal of architecture, only the result.