Tadao Ando: From modern architecture, enclosed within itself, to universality

The types of buildings, residential buildings, and commercial objects that I have worked on over the past ten years represent problems whose solutions are long-term - proportionate to the effort that must be expended. They are elusive and stimulate only a small public response. Although they undoubtedly lack the glamour and flavor of grand projects, such as theaters, libraries, and museums, these buildings, in terms of everyday relationships with human beings, represent the foundational points around which architecture evolves.
Fundamentally, architecture still derives from forms and methods created by Modernists. This is true for many reasons, particularly in Japan. First of all, there is an enormous gap between life in Japan before and after World War II. I believe that no person from the West can comprehend the distance between the old way of life and that induced by changes in this country during the post-war period. (...) The result is that while in the broader context of Western architectural culture, Modernism is a thing of the past, in Japan it remains unassimilated. The Japanese still exhibit significant contradictions in this matter. For example, while unashamedly using standard, uniform materials that are remnants of Modernism, they vigorously seek conceptual innovations and as a result, ostentatiously showcase eccentric formal expressions that are isolated from both the outer and inner lives of people. (...)
Since I was born and raised in Japan, I work as an architect here. I suppose it could be said that my approach employs a vocabulary and techniques developed from open, universal Modernism within the space of individual lifestyles and regional conventions. It seems impossible to attempt to explain the intelligibility, customs, aesthetic sensibility, distinctiveness of culture, and social traditions of a given race using the open and international vocabulary of Modernism.
Between 1955 and 1960, there were many attempts to connect this open vocabulary with its own Japanese tradition in aesthetics and forms. (...) However, attempts to reproduce in modern materials (concrete and steel) compatible technical forms that were developed in relation to the traditional building material of Japan (wood) amounted to ignoring the inevitable and fundamental links between material and form. For this reason, the buildings that attempted this faced many difficulties and soon stopped being constructed. The contradiction between unchanged forms of the past and today's lifestyle, which differs so significantly from the past, is simply too great.
After World War II, when Japan embarked on a path of rapid economic development, people's values changed. The old system, essentially feudal familial structures, collapsed. (...) For the overpopulated urban and suburban populations, it was no longer possible to maintain the most characteristic quality of Japanese dwelling architecture - the intimate relationship with nature and openness to its world. When I speak of closed modern architecture, I mean the restoration of unity between the house and nature, which Japanese houses lost in the process of modernization.
In my buildings, relationships with nature are expressed in the theory of parts. I emphasize the background against which they are built. My architecture is undoubtedly modern. And it requires both a theory of overall composition of a kind that Japanese architecture has not generated, as well as a theory dealing with the life of individual parts.
I create an architectural order based on geometry, whose basic axis consists of simple shapes - parts of a square, rectangle, and circle. Additionally, I attempt to draw from the latent forces in the area where I work and in this way create a theory of parts that arises from the delicate sensitivity of the Japanese. (...)
Opposite the house where I grew up was a lumberyard, where I spent much time as a child and where I became interested in the possibilities of shaping wood. (...) With the eyes of a child and the sensitivity of youth, I observed the effects of the environment on wood, how sunlight could alter the strength of the growth rings in a trunk, and thus change the tactile qualities of the lumber. I gained direct personal knowledge of the distinct characteristics of various types of wood, their scents, and textures. I understood the absolute balance between shape (form) and the material from which it originates. The importance of this balance I felt directly in my body. I experienced the inner struggle inherent in human will, striving for shape. My muscles recognized that creating something - that is, imbuing a physical object with meaning - is not easy.
Later, my interests began to focus on architecture, which offered the possibility to think about the intimate relationships between material and shape, and between volume and human life.
Through the experiences I gained during my childhood, I began to understand these relationships in specific architecture - not only intellectually, but with my entire physical being. Since I was about twenty, I began to discover and reflect on the things I found in Japanese rural settlements (minka) and urban houses and even in Western architecture. For instance, the light filtering through the tall windows of farmers' houses in the snowy north or the sharp contrast of light and shadow in the streets of medieval Italian city-states - when we project these into modern spaces, they reveal to me countless authentic, unembellished relationships between space in architecture and people.
The goal of my projects is that when I create according to my architectural theories, I imbue spaces with richness of meanings through such things as natural elements and many aspects of daily life. Things such as light and wind have significance only when we allow them into the house in the form cut from the outer world. Isolated fragments of light and air evoke the notion of the whole
world of nature. The forms I created changed and gained their significance through the natural elements (light and air), which indicate the passage of time and changes in the seasons, and through connections to human life. Although the space contains many possibilities for development, I prefer a simple expression. Furthermore, I enjoy it when the fixed shapes of the compositional method relate to the way of life that unfolds in that space and to the local, regional society. In other words, I choose solutions to problems as a response to prevailing circumstances. (...)
As I mentioned earlier, in the late sixties it was popular to talk about the so-called “Japanese style” and to utilize it - for example, in the form of post-and-beam structures, in buildings constructed from modern materials. However, most of these buildings advanced beyond merely copying old-fashioned elements such as roof shapes, deep eaves, latticework, and verandas. I prefer not to deal with the specific shapes themselves but with their spirit and emotional context. The spirit of the Sukiya style stimulated various developmental directions in traditional Japanese architecture.
To explain the entire nature of Sukiya architecture in which spaces for the tea ceremony developed (not merely a purely Japanese complex of art and act of expression - performance, but also essentially a concentrate of the Japanese way of behavior) is almost impossible.
On a small scale, Sukiya can mean an individual house for the tea ceremony. On a larger scale, it can refer to a whole range of relatively complex residential spaces like the Katchura Palace. The tea ceremony, which led to the construction of buildings of this kind, was popular among people of higher social classes in the past. Regardless of the scale, no Sukiya buildings had a relationship with ordinary daily life. In more modern times, the Japanese have developed the tea ceremony into an extraordinarily simplified artistic shortcut characterized by a highly rational execution of a series of individual actions. This form of art was responsible for the emergence of a group of exceptional buildings that arise from the difficult-to-define concept of Sukiya.
Although Sukiya itself is not part of the lives of ordinary people, the aesthetic sensitivity and emotion contained within it are fundamental characteristics of the Japanese as a whole. Some elements of this aesthetic appear in architecture - low eaves, spacious verandas, and subtle combinations of both. According to the tradition of Sukiya, we take the free natural scenery and artificially transform it into a solid composition. Panel "shoi" is used as an entry for light and at the same time as separation and connection of internal and external garden walls through fences.
Both panels and fences create intervals - simultaneously connecting and separating. Intervals of this kind, which define and relate the elements of a situation, are characteristic features - not only of Japanese architecture but of all Japanese art, and we might even understand them as symbols of Japanese aesthetics. Their main role is to incite expectations of the scene that is yet to come. Parts that are separated in individual intervals intertwine and overlap, thus creating new scenes within the overall situation. This notion is deeply rooted in the relationship between the Japanese house and the world of nature. In the past, the Japanese house and nature were one. The morphology of the house directed the thoughts of its inhabitants outward. This relationship with nature is particularly deliberately pursued in Sukiya-style houses. (...)
In a traditional Japanese house, there is essentially no wall. Of course, walls were used. However, their main aim was not to express the simplicity of wood, paper, clay, and reeds from which they were created. According to traditional Japanese interpretation, architecture always lies in unity with nature and seeks to isolate and fix nature in the moment it is experiencing in its organic metamorphosis. In other words, architecture is taken to an extreme simplicity, and its aesthetics is stripped of concreteness and characteristics so that it approaches the theories of Ma, that is, nothingness, void. Further connection with nature is achieved through subtle transformations, partly caused by delicate contrasts of light and shadow. In all these contexts, a wall, constructed as lightly and thinly as possible, allows - or rather precisely evokes - space. Openings in the walls of Sukiya-style buildings can be positioned anywhere according to the needs of the viewer from within. These openings allow for two kinds of variations of scenes over time: variations depending on the time of day and climate/seasonal changes, and variations dependent on the observer's standpoint. Ironically, however, these variations isolate individual scenes from the flow of time, making them static worlds or individual isolated moments in time - generating what could be described as a peculiar Japanese form of eternity. In short, because these forms are static and in a way defined, the tradition of Sukiya allows people to exist in limitless mental spaces. Even if people are "enclosed" in small places, they can permit their thoughts to reach to infinite horizons. When they do so, in extreme states of contemplation, they can listen to the voices of nature and travel cosmic distances. The Japanese interpretation of time and aesthetic sensitivity is fundamental to generating spaces as condensed as those in Sukiya’s buildings. However, in handling parts and their relationships, Sukiya buildings lack a strong orientation towards overall unity. (...)
Another traditional Japanese architecture that strongly attracts me is the old farmhouse (minka). (...) These houses have a simplicity of composition that has developed through years of struggle and friendship with nature and which reflects the settled and calm way of life, so typical of those who cultivate the land. The idea of having control over the composition of the entire building defined the lifestyle of a large family, living together as a group under one roof.
Not like in Sukiya houses, the homes of farmers consist of frames arranged as spatial totalities determined by everyday life. The strength of the frame of a farmer's dwelling derives from the simplicity of the life of its inhabitants. The Japanese view of life possesses a simple aesthetic, which becomes stronger the more superfluities are excluded and abandoned.
I attempt to use modern material - concrete, specifically concrete walls - in simplified forms to realize such a type of space because I am Japanese. It relies on the simple aesthetic sensitivity that has been cultivated in me as a Japanese. At present, I find that concrete is the most suitable material for building spaces created by sunlight. The concrete I use, however, lacks plastic rigidity or mass. Instead, it must be homogeneous and light, and must create surfaces. When it corresponds to my aesthetic conception, the walls become abstract and reach the ultimate limits of space; their concreteness is rather abstract, and only the space they enclose calls forth a sense that it truly exists. Under these conditions, volume and the light that is projected itself come to the foreground as prominent elements of spatial composition.
And that is what gives geometric composition its prominence. Universal geometric shapes clearly delineate spaces and orient the entire specific architecture in one particular direction. People living in these spaces gradually lose superficial awareness of spaces created on this principle. The forms exceed their original form and become invisible, except in certain instances. Space is the only thing capable of stimulating emotions. The visual field in daily life, without taking into account the overall conception of buildings, expands only through the continuity of parts. The theory of composition acts as an invisible, latent force. The totality of architecture supports the order of daily life; its parts (elements) enrich the scenery of ordinary life and deepen its texture. Space attains a sense of transparency when the movement from the level of abstraction to the level of specificity and the movement from the level of the whole to the level of individual parts create a unified flow, absorbed from the beginning to the end by one creative intention.
Spaces of this kind often go unnoticed in practical contexts of everyday life, and we perceive them only rarely. However, despite that, they are capable of stimulating awareness of their innermost shapes and initiating new discoveries. In this, I see the goal of what I call "enclosed modern architecture." Architecture of this kind is able to transform according to its location, where it puts down its roots and grows from it in various individual ways. Nevertheless, even if it is enclosed, I am convinced that as a methodology, it opens up to universality.