Church of the Light - Tadao Ando
Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan 1989
Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan 1989
"Tadao Ando is a very physical person." When you meet him his eyes smile back to you, then dance around you as if sparring and then reach out and clasp you momentarily, as if to size you up like a fighter. This is his natural, tactile approach with people and life, which he applies to his architectural work. His buildings instantly engage you, there is no way to avoid a response. His buildings are very strongly formed with a consistent tectonic construction and presence. The walls, ceilings and floors, with their carefully placed openings and slots, are simultaneously metaphysical as well as physical instruments of his work. (Complete Works)
It comes as no surprise to learn that Tadao Ando began his adult life as a boxer. He is still boxing, only now he throws up walls instead of punches. The walls hit you with the force and precision of a well placed blow, and draw a clear boundary around his buildings. They are more than a boundary between inside and outside, but the creation of a emptiness that assists people to develop and to be themselves. "Ando hopes to confront us with emptiness, with the Godhead." (Drew 9) In boxing Ando learned the power of the punch to be his greatest advantage. His motto, ‘take them by surprise, do the unexpected’ has become his lifetime architectural strategy. It is more than a habit in his work, it is a way of dealing with design challenges.
His life has had a mysterious quality; it is known only that he was born in 1941 in Osaka, where he has worked throughout his career. He was separated abruptly from his twin brother at youth, grew up with his grandmother who ran a store, became a professional boxer, and went traveling to find himself. When in his hometown, he frequented the 'Guntai' - 'concrete art' - group, begun with a group of Osaka artists. Self taught in architecture, he has learned how to sense space intuitively with his body rather than having spatial rules and notions inflicted on him by academia. (Chaslin)
Critics have remarked on The Church of the Light’s quietude, its calmness, its rich abstraction, and to quote, commenting on its fragments of eternity, its shadows and quasi-celestial light. In today's chaotic, sign saturated city, in our world of momentary pleasure, of commodities and impermanence, Ando has been able to express his rejection of all of this, and has instead withdrawn almost monastically into a world of simple concrete walls onto which shadows fall and light. His architecture, as shown in this building, offers a universe of contemplation, bathed in a kind of mysticism and asceticism. His work is always striking because of its pared-down quality and untreated smoothness. Light is the special medium which he uses to clarify the emptiness in the space. As compared to his early works which are as powerful as those of Mario Botta built on the slopes of Ticino at the same time. Over the years, however, his buildings have become calmer and more delicately polished. As with Church of the Light, they seem to renew the link between moments of universal architecture and moments of peace and spirituality arising from the innermost depths of Japanese or western memory, from a Zen garden or a Cisterian Abbey. And all of this is captured in a geometric abstraction and sculptural simplicity, and articulated in a language whose sobriety, almost naïve pedantry, and refusal of the modern, reads like a statement for a new renaissance. “I wanted to capture the spirit of Modernism in all its purity.” (Chaslin)
Ando has shown a rare sensitivity to the tactile quality of things and to the physical effects of spaces. He has traced labyrinthine and ritualized routes within and around his spaces, inspired by Le Corbusier’s notion of the ‘promenade architecturale’. His compositions have a perfect sense of contact with nature, and the way in which one can place oneself in and respond to the landscape, unite with or constrain a topography. Moreover, by testifying to an innate sense of the poetics of space, or a kind of phenomenological intuition, Ando’s work reflects a deeper imagination made of light and darkness, and manifests a desire to sublimate everyday life, to make the ordinary sacred, which is a very Japanese way of viewing the world.
The modern spirit that Ando wished to reclaim was essentially of a sculptural nature, combining the Purism of early Corbusier, the feeling of presence of Louis Kahn’s work and the shifting in plan of the Mexican architect Luis Barragan: but it has some characteristics of the work of minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, Richard Serra and Sol LeWitt. Each of Ando’s works is fascinating both as an object in itself and because it manages to emanate a radiance, a sobriety and a clarity that has universal value. His architecture has an air of calm assurance and is free of any kind of post-modern confusion. For many critics, Ando’s work is exemplary, a true revelation in a theoretical landscape still caught up in historicism, that can be evinced internationally from Tokyo to Portland, Oregon, or the garden of the Venice Biennale to those of Les Halles in Paris. (Chaslin)
By virtue of geometry, a subtle balance of natural light, beauty and the sensual quality of his plans, this pared down yet contemporary architecture is able to be perfectly coherent using a simple and general philosophical message. And, when one feels hopeless from the world’s crisis of a period, this is a great architectural achievement and inspiration.
Citations:
F Chaslin, 'Brutaliser l'histoire et la terre', in L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui. 287, June 1993.
Phillip Drew, Architecture in Detail: Church on the Water and Church of the Light, Phaidon Press Limited, 1996.
Tadao Ando Complete Works, Phaidon Press Limited, 1994.
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