Ando Tadao
(b Osaka, 13 Sept 1941). Japanese architect. Between 1962 and 1969
he travelled extensively, studying first-hand the architecture of
Japan, Europe, America and Africa. In 1969 he founded his own
practice in Osaka. An inheritor of the Japanese anti-seismic
reinforced-concrete tradition, Ando became one of the leading
practitioners in this genre. Capable of using fair-faced,
precision-cast reinforced-concrete walls to maximum effect, he
created a uniquely minimalist modern expression, yielding an
architecture of very firmly bounded domains. He spoke of using
‘walls to defeat walls’, by which he meant deploying the orthogonal,
strictly geometric volumes of his earlier work as a way of resisting
the empirical, not to say random, chaos of the average Japanese
megalopolis. To this end most of his early houses are highly
introspective; notable examples include two houses in Sumiyoshi,
Osaka: the award-winning, diminutive terraced Azuma House (1976) and
the Glass Block Wall House (1979), built for the Horiuchi family.
The latter is a courtyard house that gains light and views solely
from its small internal atrium. The Koshino House (1981), built in
the pine-wooded, upper-class suburbs of Ashiya (Hyogo Prefecture),
takes a more open courtyard form, but again, as in all of Ando’s
subsequent work, its subtle beauty stems from the ever-changing
impact of natural light on its concrete surfaces. As in the in-situ
concrete Soseikan tea house added to the Yamaguchi House, Takarazuka
(Hyogo Prefecture), in 1982, Ando never alluded to the Japanese
tradition directly but always instead to the qualities of both
half-muted and sharply contrasting light in which this tradition is
steeped.
