Museum SAN – standing for “space, art, nature” – is a place where art and architecture blend in with the surrounding mountains and greenery. Visitors are invited to “disconnect to connect” as they explore the vast site.
“This exhibition spanning five decades of [Ando’s] career is therefore not just confined to the indoor space,” says Noh Eun-sil, the curator behind the show.
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Ando’s Zen-inspired architectural philosophy, which marries minimalist modernism with profound spirituality, reverberates far beyond the gallery walls and can be felt in the museum’s geometric courtyards, reflective pools, stone gardens and meditation dome.
Ando challenged the credential-obsessed Japanese society in the late 1960s with an unusual career trajectory: a pro-boxer-turned-architect with no formal training.
He developed his creative passion outside academia, notably through intense reading and trips to Europe via the Trans-Siberian Express, where he witnessed in person the architectural feats of modernism – including the tours de force of Le Corbusier.
The Swiss-French Purist came to have a profound impact on the self-taught Japanese architect – namely, his love affair with concrete. (Ando also famously paid tribute to the European creator in a more personal way when he named his pet dog Le Corbusier.)
Since its invention in the mid-19th century, concrete has become a telling symbol of the modern industrial era.
“It’s a material that anyone can purchase and use nowadays,” Ando said at the new exhibition’s press preview, held on a cloudless March afternoon at the museum. “With such an easy-to-access medium, I wanted to build something that no other could.”
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It was a slow start for the young Japanese architect when he first opened his “atelier” in 1969. For the first decade, hardly any clients knocked on the door of his studio. Those that did came with projects with tight budgets and narrow lots.
But these challenges were ultimately what pushed him to establish his signature vocabulary that celebrates the values of simplicity and understated grace through a striking mix of exposed concrete, light and surrounding natural landscape.
“Youth”, an extensive survey of his 50 years of works that were brought to life in his native Japan, Korea, the United States, Italy and France, presents through original sketches, blueprints, models and videos the major structures that made Ando a household name.
One of his most cited projects is Ibaraki Kasugaoka Church in the Japanese city of Osaka, better known as the Church of the Light. Here, light can only come through a large cross-shaped slit in one of the concrete walls, which illuminates the otherwise dark chapel. With its simplicity, the cruciform glow that appears behind the altar transforms the interior into a profoundly sublime space.
Such a spiritual encounter continues in the Hill of the Buddha, nestled in a shrine in a cemetery in the Japanese city of Sapporo. To highlight the imposing presence of the 13.5m-tall Buddhist statue, Tado once again does something beyond imagination – that is, burying the monument in an artificial hill covered in lavender, with only the top of its head peeking out.
The colossal statue now only reveals itself to visitors who approach it through a 40m tunnel. Ando’s design turns the whole viewing experience into a majestic spectacle.
The exhibition also dedicates a section to the architect’s longest-running project, on the island of Naoshima, in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea.
It was in the mid-1980s when he was invited to add an “Andoian” twist to the nearly barren island with a population of 3,000.
Over the next three decades, the remote island’s fate slowly began to change as he designed one unusual building after another – Benesse House Museum, Chichu Art Museum, Lee Ufan Museum, Ando Museum, Valley Gallery, among others – with many buried underground and exposed only to natural lighting.
The concrete structures that organically intertwine with the surrounding environment, together with one of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s iconic polka-dotted pumpkins installed at the end of a pier (a new version after the first got swept away in a typhoon in 2021), have transformed Naoshima into an island of art that draws as many as 800,000 tourists a year.
“If you make a museum that can only exist there, people are bound to come from all corners of the globe,” Ando said. “And when you give birth to a child, you have to raise them. It is the same with museums. After you build it, you must let it grow with you.”
But not every piece on display is a success story. Being a star architect also means being familiar with the taste of rejection and failure.
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He does not back away from putting on view the ideas that were never realised – and, therefore, survive only in the form of sketches and blueprints.
In the late 1980s, he submitted a proposal for the renovation of the Osaka City Central Public Hall, where he boldly suggested that an egg-shaped concrete hall be inserted inside the orange Neo-Renaissance architecture built in 1918 so that the past and the present could be in dialogue.
The result was a flat “no” from the city administration.
“The more interesting an idea is, the more people say no to it at first,” Tado said. “So I’m never bothered by rejections. They just push me to look for ways to bring my vision to life somewhere else.”
Years later, he did. The Punta della Dogana art museum in Venice, and the Bourse de Commerce exhibition space in Paris, both embody his idea of inserting a new structure inside an old one while retaining the original framework.
The Punta della Dogana, originally a 17th-century customs house, now hosts a concrete cube to exhibit contemporary masterpieces. Inside the 16th-century Bourse de Commerce historical monument in Paris, a concrete circle with a diameter of 30m occupies the grand rotunda and serves as a display area.
“If you cherish and hold onto your ideas long enough, they will materialise one day in whatever way possible. And if you want to see that happen, you must live long – and stay youthful,” Ando said, laughing and reminding the reporters of his green apple once again.
Like American poet Samuel Ullman’s words about youth that were an inspiration behind the fruit sculpture – “Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind … it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigour of the emotions” – Tado vows to keep his youthful spirit alive for as long as he can.
This year, the Japanese architect is building a second meditation hall, named The Space of Light, at Museum SAN. A new children’s library in Bangladesh will be completed in the coming months. And his team is working to bring to life a community-based art museum on Naoshima as yet another addition to the island’s cultural fabric.
“Not so long ago, I got to have a conversation with heaven. They’ll actually let me live for another 20 years or so,” Tado said, rather jovially. “So, I have another two decades to design buildings that can bring hope to people.”
“Tadao Ando: Youth” runs through July 30 at Museum SAN.
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