It is not easy to condense into a tiny narrative space the personality of Tadao Ando (Osaka, Japan 1941), a designer whose lexicon is as anti-conventional and “understated”, far from any clamour, as it is exceptionally “eloquent” and has remained a reference in the international architectural scene for decades. A lexicon rooted as much in the cultural traditions of Japan as in international Modern, in the search for a spatial archetype of pure, unadorned geometries, of silent and introverted compositions, where light and water are design materials just like reinforced concrete, and where contrasts of light and shadow, full and empty, abstract and material draw powerfully evocative spaces.
Tadao Ando’s Architecture in 5 defining works
We explore the poetics of the great Japanese architect, who expresses his vision through spatial archetypes and the contrast of opposites.
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Foto Raphael Azevedo Franca from wikimedia commons
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Photo stimmunngsbilder1 from Adobe Stock
Photo from Domus 1006, October 2016
Photo fromDomus 1006, october 2016
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- Chiara Testoni
- 12 February 2025
From the first single-family houses in the 1970s, moving on to larger and more complex programmes and projects such as churches, galleries and museums in the 1980s and up to the present day, Ando's spatial research has retained its distinctive poetic elements, declining them each time with sensitivity and precision, making his work among the most recognisable and globally admired, as attested by the Pritzker Prize he received in 1995. In 2021, Tadao Ando took on the role of Domus Guest Editor.
Domus has selected five works that embody Ando's profoundly recognisable poetics, coherent over the decades, regardless of context and scale: from the first small buildings (Church of Light), to those on a vast dimension (Rokko Housing, Buddha Hill), to works in dialogue with the historical (Punta della Dogana) and contemporary (Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art) context.
The religious building is housed in a pure concrete “box”, cut by a 15-degree sloping wall separating the two entrance and prayer spaces. The essential environment, far from the splendour of institutional monumentality, encourages an intimate and authentic spirituality, emphasised by the massive, exposed cement walls, the floors and furnishings made of wooden planks of scaffolding, and the cross carved into the wall behind the altar, from which light filters in during the day.
Situated on the slopes of the mountain of the homonymous name, the residential complex puts Ando face to face with the problem of residential density, here tackled by the designer with a focus on preserving living quality and neighbourly relations. Despite having been completed over a period of almost twenty years, the three blocks have common characteristics that give the complex a unified identity: they exploit the site's conditions to the full through a staggered arrangement that follows the slope; they use exposed reinforced concrete, both for the modular structure and for the façades; they create paths and shaded interstitial spaces that serve as public and semi-public areas for neighbourhood interactions. Each dwelling has a terrace and is appropriately oriented to make the most of the view of the landscape.
The museum complex, situated near Louis Kahn' Kimbell Art Museum and Philip Johnson's Amon Carter Museum, is composed of five volumes of glass, aluminium, steel, granite and concrete, set in a pool of water. A skilful calibration of artificial and natural light characterises the spaces, illuminated by floor-to-ceiling windows and skylights that interrupt the generous concrete cantilevered flat roofs, supported by Y-shaped pillars.
The historic triangular-shaped complex of the Punta della Dogana warehouses, located between the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal, has been restored by Ando to house the exhibition spaces of the François Pinault Foundation. The respectful approach to the context has brought back to light the original fine features while eliminating incongruous elements. The project deals with the existing building through a rigorous and minimal contemporary lexicon, evident in the exposed concrete of the new walls and of the sculptural cube placed in the double-height central room, which serves as the core of the exhibition itinerary.
This landscape-scale project concerns the installation of a monumental stone statue of Buddha in the naturalistic context of a cemetery near Sapporo to create a place for meditation. A hill covered with lavender plants, crossed by underground pathways, surrounds the sacred statue: in front of the hill, a rectangular water garden surrounded by concrete walls leads into a 40 m long, concrete path carved into the hillside, from which the visitor enters the circular cone-shaped open-air hall, in the centre of which the statue is placed.