Inspiration, the architecture of Tadao Ando
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| Start | Ando | Java | Chartres | Corbusier | Iceland | Kahn | ||
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| Kalkar | Ladakh | Rembrandt | Svalbard | Turrell | Vermeer | Wadden |
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| As an architect Tadao Ando is self-taught; he never studied
at a university school of architecture. He is impressed by the effect
of light filtering through the high windows into farmhouses in the
snow north of Japan. The sharp contrast of light and shade in the
streets of medieval Italian cities reigned this memory.
Ando's work springs from the subconscious. At the intersection of light and silence we become aware of 'nothingness', a void at the heart of things. One of the leading features of Ando's interiors is their profound emptiness. His architecture is using a simple geometry of cubes and cylinders, bare concrete walls, solids and voids, light and darkness. In his Church of the Light, Ibaraki, Osaka, 1987-89 glazed openings at the points of intersection -- approximately the midpoint of the side wall and at the end wall nearest the entry -- provide light for the otherwise dark interior. |
Changing daylight images appear in the commissions and sculptures of Joost van Santen,
adding value to the physical appaerance of the works.