The Birth of Tadao Ando, Architect
Tadao Ando, the world-renowned architect, did not receive a formal college education. This is the story of his making.
Early Life
Osaka, once called the “City of Water”, is one of Japan’s major commercial centers. In Ando’s words, its people are resistant to authority, defiant, and ever contrarian. It is here that he was raised by his grandmother in a typical 50-square-meter row house.
Ando lived in a neighborhood home to a variety of craftsmen, such as woodworkers, ironworkers, and glassmakers. As a child, he spent his days building things out of scrap wood at a woodshop for fun.
For Ando, who did not receive a higher education in architecture, the neighborhood of craftsmen was a place for foundational learning.
When Ando was in junior high school, local carpenters carried out renovation work at his home, and he helped build an attic. He recalls this as his first experience of making architecture with his own hands.
During the renovation work, Ando saw a vivid ray of light shine down into the darkness from a hole opened in the roof. That became the starting point of Ando’s architecture.
Tadao Ando, age 17. He was a boxer.
Ando began boxing in high school through the influence of his twin brother and made his professional debut at age 17. Boxing helped him develop his quiet fighting spirit and stoic perseverance that later became his strengths as an architect.
Ando left his boxing career after he was overwhelmed by the sight of former world champion Fighting Harada sparring. He then began studying architecture on his own while working at interior and furniture design firms that he was introduced to through acquaintances.
The Grand Tour
The international travel ban for Japanese citizens was lifted in the year of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The young Ando, who was an admirer of Le Corbusier, the father of modern architecture, headed out on a voyage to Europe.
It is important to reexamine yourself and discover the person you are through your first-hand encounters with values that differ from your own. (Tadao Ando).
Ando arrived in Europe after taking a ship from Yokohama to the Soviet Union and riding the Trans-Siberian Railway for a week to Moscow.
He saw many architectural masterpieces during his trip, including the Parthenon in Greece and the Pantheon in Rome.
What he especially wanted to see were the buildings of Le Corbusier, whom he had admired ever since he found a monograph of his work in a used bookstore. The architect, who took a stand against academism and never ceased to fight, very much became a role model for Ando.
Ando considers that experience of traveling the world for several years in his twenties as the starting point of all his work in architecture.
Travel Sketchs by Tadao AndoOriginal Source: Tadao Ando Architect & Associates
He traveled many more times after that to places around the world from Asia to the Americas, and on each trip, he documented the architecture and lives of the local people in his sketchbooks.
Architecture encompasses things that cannot be captured through the media. This is why architects must travel; architects are made through traveling. (Tadao Ando)
After traveling the world and meeting many leading figures from a variety of fields, Ando founded his own design studio in his hometown of Osaka in 1969.
Urban Guerilla Ⅰ (1972) by Tadao AndoOriginal Source: Tadao Ando Architect & Associates
Urban Guerrilla Houses
Meeting with an avant-garde artist-activist who fought against established values. Ando happened to witness the May riots in Paris. In 1972, following that period of global upheaval that left a sense of hope and uncertainty in the air, he presented the Urban Guerrilla Houses.
During Japan’s period of rapid economic growth, living conditions deteriorated in cities and economic principles increasingly came to dictate the way people live.
This was the backdrop against which the young architect designed the experimental Urban Guerrilla Houses as a means of self-expression. The houses were centered around the individual and grounded on a corporeal intuition.
By eliminating the façade as an expression of antipathy and rejection of the external environment and focusing on creating a rich interior space, a microcosm emerges, and it is in this space that I pursue a new reality. (Tadao Ando)
Of the Urban Guerrilla Houses that Ando presented, the Tomishima House was the only one that was realized. The concrete wall protects the independent lives of the residents from the violence of the city.
A minimal opening in the form of a skylight captured the light and wind, bringing the rhythms of nature into the closed space. In it, one can already see the seeds of the themes that would come to characterize Ando’s later work.
Concrete walls are a hallmark of Ando’s work. Nothing has contributed more to this impression than the Row House in Sumiyoshi: a reclusive concrete box that he boldly inserted into the middle of a line of row houses in an Osakan neighborhood similar to the one where he grew up.
The reticent character of the concrete, the simple geometric composition, the presence of nature captured through light—all of these features of the Row House in Sumiyoshi would come to define Ando’s later work, and they also were the things that brought him widespread recognition.
A Fighting Architect
This is the beginning of the story of Tadao Ando, the architect who continues to fight.
There is something beautiful about the sight of people standing up to fight. Seeing the backs of those fighters during those tumultuous years of the rebellious ’60s made me want to be like them. (Tadao Ando)
Text：Shinichi Kawakatsu
Editor：Ryusuke Wada
Direction：neucitora
Supervision：Tadao Ando Architect & Associates
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