Towards New Horizons in Architecture by Tadao Ando
Focusing on the importance of phenomenology and site in Tadao Ando's design process and theory. The quietude derived from simplicity of form, and the introduction of nature. Architects has the responsibility to draw out the particular characteristics of a given place, and able to capture the interaction between the landscape and the buildings which allows for spiritual awakening and similar perhaps to Heidegger's conception of dwelling.
Thus, Japanese culture emphasized a spiritual threshold between the building and nature. Ando often utilize concrete as sole material and point to the use of light and wind.
Transparent Logic
Architectural creation involves contemplating the origins and essence of a project’s functional requirements and the subsequent determination of its essential issues. Only in this way can the architect manifest in the architecture the character of its origins.
Abstraction
The real world is complex and contradictory. At the core of architectural creation is the transformation of the concreteness of the real through transparent logic into spatial order. This is not an elimination abstraction but, rather, an attempt at the organization of the real around an intrinsic viewpoint to give it order through abstract power. The starting point of an architectural problem – whether place, nature, lifestyle, or history – is expressed within this development into the abstract. Only an effort of this nature will produce a rich and variable architecture.
Nature
Ando seek to instill the presence of nature within an architecture austerely constructed by means of transparent logic. The elements of nature – water, wind, light, and sky – bring architecture derived from ideological thought down to the ground level of reality and awaken manmade life within it.
The Japanese tradition embraces a different sensibility about nature than that found in the West. Human life is not intended to oppose nature and endeavor to control it, but rather to draw nature into an intimate association in order to find union with it. One can go so far as to say that, in Japan, all forms of spiritual exercise are traditionally carried out within the context of the human interrelationship with nature.
This kind of sensibility has formed a culture that de-emphasizes the physical boundary between residence and surrounding nature and establishes instead a spiritual threshold. While screening man’s dwelling from nature, it attempts to draw nature inside. There is no clear demarcation between outside and inside, but rather their mutual permeation. Today, unfortunately, nature has lost much of its former abundance, just as we have enfeebled our ability to perceive nature. Contemporary architecture, thus, has a role to play in providing people with architectural places that make them feel the presence of nature. When it does this, architecture transforms nature through abstraction, changing its meaning. When water, wind, light, rain, and other elements of nature are abstracted within architecture, the architecture becomes a place where people and nature confront each other under a sustained sense of tension. I believe it is this feeling of tension that will awaken the spiritual sensibilitieslatent in contemporary humanity.
Place
The presence of architecture – regardless of its self-contained character – inevitably creates a new landscape. This implies the necessity of discovering the architecture which the site itself is seeking.
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