Tag Archives: CONCRETE

#204: TADAO ANDO | MUSEUM MINUS THE ROOF

April 11, 2025

(photo by Anthony Poon)

In a world of architectural iteration and imitation—where ideas are too prevalent through the influential forces of media—it is rare to find a project that is the exception to the rule. In Kyoto, Japan, the Garden of Fine Arts is a unique museum simply for one reason: It has no roof.

(photo by Anthony Poon)

Self-taught architect, Tadao Ando, born 1941, started his career as a professional boxer—of all things. It is said that his visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Tokyo Imperial Hotel inspired the young boxer to switch from fighting others with his fists to fighting creative ideas with pencil and paper. Running an architectural studio in Osaka, the 1995 Pritzker Prize-recipient offers Zen-like, minimal, austere designs. Wikipedia states, “Ando’s architectural style is said to create a ‘haiku’ effect, emphasizing nothingness and empty space to represent the beauty of simplicity.”

(Google Maps)

The architectural elements of the Garden of Fine Arts make up an economic mixture: overlapping walls, ramps and water. The open-air museum starts at street level, then ramps visitors down and further down—a design that retains views to the Botanical Gardens nearby and Higashiyama mountains beyond.

(photo by Anthony Poon)

Completed in 1994, the building—a kind of anti-building—delivers the art world of Europe to a historical capital city of Japan. The spiritual journey within the museum presents eight classic masterpieces reproduced on ceramic porcelain panels/plates, to name a few:

  • da Vinci’s Last Supper,
  • Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment,
  • Monet’s Water Lilies, and
  • Renoir’s On the Terrace.
(photo by Anthony Poon)

Throughout the project, Ando uses his signature material, poured-in-place concrete. It is not applied in a commonplace manner. Rather, his concrete possesses a luxurious quality akin to natural stone. There is no industrial rawness here. Instead, the architect achieves lightness, even silkiness. Concrete is rarely used in Japanese architecture, whether traditional or contemporary. The country’s design vernacular looks towards wood, stone and paper, yet nearly all of Ando’s works are entirely concrete, cast in place.

(photo by Anthony Poon)

An additional design material—if you can call it that—is used throughout, an unexpected medium—that of sound. The building engages the museum-goer aurally, as one hears: footsteps reverberate on concrete; breezes wrap around corners; voices echoe from behind walls; and waterfalls crash into shallow reflecting pools.

(photo by Anthony Poon)

And with no roof, the design relies heavily on the walls. Such walls: present art; loosely imply rooms; guide one’s path into the earth; frame views and vistas; and slice through space. Tadao Ando has proclaimed, “At times walls manifest a power that borders on the violent. They have the power to divide space, transfigure place, and create new domains. Walls are the most basic elements of architecture, but they can also be the most enriching.”

(from architectureassociate.blogspot.com)

#161: AUTHENTICITY AND DISHONESTY IN MATERIALS

November 18, 2022

Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India, by Louis Kahn (photo by Abhishek Donda on Unsplash)

”If you think of Brick, you say to Brick, ‘What do you want, Brick?’

“And Brick says to you, ‘I like an Arch.’

“And if you say to Brick, ‘Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over you. What do you think of that, Brick?’

“Brick says, ‘I like an Arch.’

“And it’s important, you see, that you honor the material that you use. You can only do it if you honor the brick and glorify the brick instead of shortchanging it.” So proclaimed Louis Kahn.

Louis Kahn,1901-1974 (photo from architectural-review.com)

When classical composers wrote music, the work was specific to the instruments selected. No one would ever imagine Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto featuring a clarinet, rather than the virtuoso 88 keys of a piano. That would not only be outrageous to consider, but blasphemous.

But when J.S. Bach composed his world-famous violin concertos, he also recommended that the lead part need not be a violin, but could be a piano or even an oboe—or what have you. This nonchalance argues that there is nothing authentic or integral in what he has written—that the music can be sacrilegious to the instrument. Is the piano and the oboe dishonest to the violin?

J.S. Bach, 1685-1750 (photo from oae.co.uk)

If one thinks of music as a physical building material, then Bach’s approach is unfaithful to the inherent qualities of a material. Architecturally speaking, Bach would suggest that a wood structure could also be made of glass or a glass building successful in brick. But what would I.M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre be if not sleek glass and delicate steel? What would it be as brick?

Pyramid at the Louvre Museum, Paris, France, I.M. Pei (photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash)

Building materials have essential qualities, both within the laws of physics as well as emotional perception. For example, concrete has the capacity to bear weight, hence its use in foundations and structural walls. Concrete also has an innate personality of strength and durability. But steel, which can also takes on the role of muscularity, can be used with sinuous subtlety.

Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California, by Louis Kahn (photo by Sam Li on Unsplash)

Historically, glass serves as a window, a view through a solid wall in which to look out and let in light. Transparency was inherent to glass. But in contemporary architecture, glass is not necessarily clear. Glass can be a construction material that solidly wraps a building, similar to stone, wood, or plaster. With opaque glazing, such as spandrel glass, one is not expected to see through the material at all, but now something you look at.

132 Rosetti, Basel, Switzerland, Herzog and de Meuron (photo by Margherita Spiluttini)

Whether respecting the intrinsic nature of materials—or of classical instruments—or whether the approach is one of contemporary interpretation or even irony, materials have integral truths, righteous morality even, as Kahn might suggest. Bach often implied: Know the rules before you decide to break them.

London, England (photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash)
© Poon Design Inc.