This weighty coffee-table tome, if accidentally knocked off furniture, could maim a small dog, one like “Le Corbusier,” who happens to be Tadao Ando’s pet. This isn‘t mentioned frivolously – nor is it irrelevant to this magnificent, and magnificently flawed, catalogue raisonée of Ando’s architecture. An autodidact, Ando began his commitment to design at age 15 after reading Corbu rather than seeking a formal design education, and one way of considering the meaningfulness of Ando’s opus thus far is to treat his vision as Le Corbusier’s vision both tamed and allowed to run wild.

 

This review of Ando: Complete Works 1975-2010 (Taschen, 2010) begins with this tangent about Le Corbusier (and his canine version) because Philip Jodidio’s commentaries barely transcend dutifully noting Le Corbusier’s catalytic impact on Ando finding his own identity. There is nothing markedly incorrect or sloppy in Jodidio’s comments – they are the same that you can read in other articles and monographs. What troubles is the missed opportunity to get under the surfaces of Ando’s art.

 

The copious photographs and drawings alone justify the book’s purchase, with the large 12-by-15-inch format ideal for conveying both monumentality and details. With the heft of the book in hand, there’s the opportunity to see gorgeous photo spreads of 50 built and planned projects, with the rest of Ando’s works contained in black-and-white thumbnails no e-book reader should carp about discerning.

 

The 20 photographers, the real “authors” of this colossal volume, should be roundly applauded for evoking the dance of light across concrete that is the heart of Ando’s art. Derived from Le Corbusier, and filtered through Louis Kahn’s influence, Ando makes his mark apart from his early mentors by exercising those facets of Japanese aesthetic sensibility most ignored by fey Western advocates of Japonisme. Ando’s Japanese aesthetics is not the stuff of delicate tea rituals; his is the Japanese sensibility that spawned martial arts and Noh theater. There’s nothing of the architect as affected aesthete here, nothing stereotypically anemically academic. He’s earned his keep in his youth as a professional boxer and truck driver, and those high-impact, athletic professions left their mark in these earthy works. His artistry with concrete – 15-foot-thick walls of it that nevertheless create a sense of spiritual lightness and buoyancy – substantiates the claim of Ando as a post-Corbusier architect without qualms about wildly amplifying as well as softly refining the concrete proclivities of his teacher.

 

I would suggest bypassing Jodidio’s workmanlike but uninspired introduction and going directly to the photographs and drawings as you please. After doing so with pleasure at every image, I found myself most often returning to the Chichu Art Museum that has among its small collection a Monet “Water Lilies” and three works by the light/earthworks artist James Turrell. Largely underground, Ando has crafted a museum where indirect light from Nature continually surprises, and perhaps even sensually caresses visitors, as they meditate on this museum-based community of artists of light nested in an ideal house of light.

 

This is as close to capturing Tadao Ando’s magic as any book is likely to achieve, my reservations about the commentary notwithstanding.

 

 

Norman Weinstein writes about architecture and design for Architectural Record and The Christian Science Monitor, and is the author of “Words That Build” – an exclusive 21-part series published by ArchNewsNow.com – that focuses on the overlooked foundations of architecture: oral and written communication. He consults with architects and engineers interested in communicating more profitably. You can reach him at nweinste@mindspring.com.

 

More by Weinstein:

 

Celebratory Meditations on SANAA Winning the Pritzker Prize

 

Op-Ed: Life After Ada: Reassessing the Utility of Architectural Criticism 
Ada Louise Huxtable deserves mucho thanks and praise - but other questions moving us to a new flavor of criticism have to be asked.

 

Book Review: Sage Architectural Reflections from Architecture's "Athena": Denise Scott Brown's "Having Words" distills a lifetime of theorizing and practice into practical and succinct guidance for thriving through difficult times
Brown's occasional papers trace a trenchant trajectory of learning from Las Vegas to learning from everything.

 

Book Review: Keeping the Architectural Profession Professional: "Architecture from the Outside In: Selected Essays by Robert Gutman" celebrates Gutman's legacy as invaluable outsider
Selected essays by a penetrating sociologist of architecture pose the kinds of tough-minded questions needed now to keep architectural professional on-track.

 

Book Review: "Design through Dialogue: A Guide for Clients and Architects," by Karen A. Franck and Teresa von Sommaruga Howard
A helpful communications primer offers case studies of winning collaborations between clients and architects, but as useful as this book proves, it leaves some uncomfortable questions about communication unaddressed.

 

Twilight Visions: Vintage Surrealist Photography Sheds New Light on Architecture 
An exhibition and book of photographs of Paris between the wars might just be the necessary correctives to the virtual sterility of digital imagery

 

Best Architecture Books of 2009 
10 crucial volumes from the classic to the iconoclastic

 

Book Review: "Gunnar Birkerts: Metaphoric Modernist" by Sven Birkerts and Martin Schwartz

A major architect in the history of Modernism finally receives recognition – and sundry asides about why Modernism never exited.

 

Book Review: "Urban Design for an Urban Century: Placemaking for People," by Lance Jay Brown, David Dixon, and Oliver Gillham 
To the credit of the erudite authors, their sketch of urban design brings levels of political, sociological, and architectural analysis together in a readable synthesis.

 

Book Review: "Everything Must Move: 15 Years at Rice School of Architecture 1994-2009" 
There’s a Texas flood of architectural ideas that gives ample evidence of an architecture school that unsettles pat assumptions. Who could ask for anything more?

 

Book Review: A Subversive Book Every Architect Needs: "Architect's Essentials of Negotiation" by Ava J. Abramowitz 
Supposedly architects don't need negotiating skills along with other communication skills because great design "sells itself." How lovely that an AIA legal counsel created this definitive book to shatter that thin myth.

 

Book Review: A Perspective from One Elevation: "Conversations With Frank Gehry" by Barbara Isenberg

Gehry's conversations offer portraits of an astute listener as well as talker, an architect as aware of his flaws and limitations as of his virtues.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2008 
10 tomes from the superior to the indispensable

 

Book Review: You've Got to Draw the Line Somewhere

A review of Drafting Culture: a Social History of Architectural Graphic Standards by George Barnett Johnston

 

Book Review: "NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith," edited by Franklin Sirmans

Sharpen your pencils - and get ready to do a NeoHooDoo shimmy.