Jonathan Morrison
Tadao Ando, the fashion set’s most wanted architect
As a show of his work opens in Giorgio Armani’s gallery in Milan, the architect talks to Jonathan Morrison
For a man missing his gallbladder, duodenum, pancreas and spleen, Tadao Ando, one of Japan’s most celebrated architects, seems remarkably sprightly. In fact, he jokes that the surgery he underwent in 2015 for cancer has made him “much lighter”. This is proving useful, he says. After all, he’s always on the move, meeting, sketching, surrounded by a coterie of helpers and media. He doesn’t have to spend as much time eating and can study instead. He’s working on projects as far afield as New York and Paris and has just opened an exhibition of his work in Milan.
He still teaches, and sometimes marks his students’ work with wooden stamps that say “incompetent” and “get out”. So he quickly brushes aside any concerns over his health, states firmly that “if you have a goal in life, people live” and insists that he will reach the age of 100 in a little under 22 and a half years.
Tadao Ando at the National Art Center in Tokyo
You wouldn’t put it past him. After all, the single quality linking his two main career choices — boxing and architecture — is “determination”. “Once you’re in the ring no one will help you,” he says. “You’re on your own. It’s the same in architecture.” Behind the droll expression and hangdog eyes, beneath the orange-grey mop of hair, there’s the wary look of someone who is always ready to rumble.
He’s a difficult man to profile. He was born in Osaka, the second-biggest city in Japan, in September 1941, and was largely raised in a tough, working-class district by his grandmother. He has a twin brother, whom he refuses to talk about, who stayed with their parents and who is believed to be a successful businessman.
He won’t talk about his wife, Yumiko, who still manages his small company of some 25 people; asking about children would be considered disrespectful and result in the interview being terminated. He is happy, though, to talk about two formative experiences: the carpenter who came to fix their ramshackle wooden house when he was 12, and who impressed the young Ando with his passion, and the time he went to look at a local boxing gym.
“I was looking through the windows and felt they were not that great, so I went in and was accepted immediately,” he says. Naturally scrappy-go-lucky, by the age of 15 he was a professional boxer and would participate in a dozen bouts. And that combativeness never left him; there’s at least one story about the time he punched a worker who had dropped a cigarette butt into a batch of his famously glossy concrete.
The seed sown by the industrious carpenter, who would work throughout his lunch break to get the job done, continued to sprout. Ando became first an apprentice, encouraging his clients to accept increasingly unconventional designs, then started to teach himself architecture. He may have won the Pritzker prize in 1995, the most prestigious award in the profession, but he has no formal qualifications.
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas
That innate determination came in useful again: he read all the books normally assigned over a four-year course in just a year, but failed to find a mentor, apparently being fired for “stubbornness and temper” every time he tried to settle.
In 1965 he took the Trans-Siberian railway to Europe and embarked on a grand tour of buildings he admired, visiting various Carlos Scarpa and Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp, France (he named his dog after the Swiss modernist) and above all the Pantheon in Rome, wondering at the light and the pattern of shadows and feeling his “heart moved and captured”. He has been in love with concrete ever since.
He is, then, a person of some big contradictions. Accomplished artist and boxer, self-made man and noted intellectual, working-class lad and friend of the fashionistas — including Giorgio Armani, who is hosting his impressive retrospective in the Armani/Silos exhibition space in Milan. Ando claims that, despite not sharing a common tongue, they can “read each other’s hearts”, but it’s more likely that Armani can appreciate the superb draughtsmanship and photography on show. Ando taught himself those as well.
The Challenge, a show of work at Armani/Silos in Milan by Tadao Ando (GIORGIO ARMANI)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are tensions in his architecture too: the concrete paired with nature, brutalism with Shinto, water with unforgiving rectilinear forms, blinding daylight with the subterranean. And perhaps that is why it resonates so strongly, with his signature puckered slabs somehow forged into something spiritual. Nowhere is this more evident than at the Church of the Light in Ibaraki, Japan, probably his most famous project.
He is not well known in the UK, however, which is our loss. In London he has completed an oval water feature outside a hotel in Mayfair, and in Manchester he created a 130m concrete wall and pavilion at Piccadilly Gardens in time for the Commonwealth Games of 2002. The latter hasn’t proved popular, except perhaps with the homeless, and was scheduled for demolition until a last-minute reprieve last month; it will now be covered in greenery. That’s the problem with the British rain — it doesn’t tend to dignify concrete in the same way as perpetual sun.
Does he mind that his Manchester wall is to be turned into a trellis? “Functionality changes over time, and it belongs to the locals,” he says with a shrug. “The city and residents should talk about it and come up with a solution.”
In fact, covering his minimalist structures with greenery is something he does quite often, in part to atone for the CO2 generated by cement manufacturing, but also because he believes “we need to stop stealing space from nature”.
So for 30 years he has been inserting geometric shapes into the island of Naoshima, once heavily polluted by refining, transforming the topography with a series of stunning subterranean galleries on behalf of the Benesse publishing company, and planting cherry trees all around them. In 2016 in Sapporo he buried a 13.5m statue of the Buddha under a mound of pleated concrete and earth and 150,000 lavenders, creating one of the strangest shrines on the planet.
Langen Foundation near Neuss, Germany (REX/SHUTTERSTOCK)
These are fairly monumental schemes, creating drama through their scale, but size wasn’t always so important. When he opened his practice in 1969 in Osaka, he concentrated on producing tiny houses. These turn an implacable frontage to the street, entirely self-contained, uncompromising. One early project was 3m wide and only 15m long and he jokes that he would still like to build an even smaller home — “Maybe even half” — and laughs when I offer him my garden.
“If you follow your heart, you tend not to like things that are large,” he says. “Large buildings come from money, to show power. I place heart over money. To create something that lasts in the heart for ever, you don’t have to create something large. And my challenge every day is to create something that lasts in the heart.”
Nowadays, though, they seem dense and defensive — classically brutalist, extremely austere — but his later designs, such as the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, in the United States, or the Langen Foundation in Germany, embrace glass and water and are relatively open and airy. At the Shanghai Poly Theatre, completed in 2014, he has even drilled a double hole straight through it like the Hatton Garden job. And somewhere in between is the tripartite Rokko Housing in Kobe and the Akashi Kaikyo National Government Park on Awaji Island with their cascades of cubes.
How does he explain the endless experimentation and the change in style? “It has been changing for the past 50 years,” he says. “But I also work with a client and, without compromising myself, I try to fulfil their wishes.”
Bourse de Commerce in Paris (ARTEFACTORY LAB)
There’s a pause, as if he’s waiting to see if this is believable. He sketches upside down on my list of questions, quick flicks of the pen delineating the dissimilar projects we have been talking about. Then he adds: “A lot of times the client talks nonsense, but Ando doesn’t hear these things. I have projects all over the world, but since I don’t speak the language, I can choose to ignore them. I just don’t listen. It is quite a pleasure not speaking other people’s languages.”
This may help to explain why one of his latest and most controversial projects — converting the old Parisian Bourse de Commerce, a protected building with its famous domed ceiling and 360-degree fresco, into a contemporary art museum — seems to be going surprisingly smoothly.
Ando plans to insert a huge cylinder of concrete into the very centre to form a new exhibition space for the collection amassed by the billionaire businessman François Pinault; he did something similar for Pinault at the Punta della Dogana in Venice with a smaller cube. In total, the project was expected to take a decade, but will be completed just four years after work started. “People in Paris talk and talk and talk,” he says. “I don’t listen.”
It’s a typically pugnacious response, but then, as he says, “creation is fighting”. And one thing is clear from the retrospective in Milan, with its cross-hatched sketches of the built and unbuilt — a domed memorial to 9/11 for New York; the Chapel on the Water on Hokkaido — and enormous, intricate models: there are certainly few architects whose work packs more of a punch.
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