Tadao Ando likes to tell the story of a stray dog that walked into his office in Osaka one day. “My wife, Yumiko, and I decided to adopt him but couldn’t think of a name. Kenzo Tange came to mind, but then I realized I couldn’t kick him around. And so I called the puppy Le Corbusier!” Previously and fatefully, the French architect had entered Ando’s life in a second-hand bookshop in Osaka, where a rare catalogue of Le Corbusier’s drawings fell into his hands. It became Ando’s bible and set him on the path to modern architecture.
In 1995 Ando’s career culminated with the world’s most prestigious architectural decoration the Pritzker Prize. (It came with a US$100,000 award, which Ando donated to orphans of the Great Hanshin earthquake in Kobe). Magazines that write about Ando never fail to mention that in his teenage years he was a truck driver and a boxer, a background that sets him a tough, self-taught street kid from Osaka apart from the snobbish Tokyo university graduates that largely comprise the architectural elite. Ando has embraced this desperado image and feeds it into conversations through allegories of survival, killing and fear. One is easily charmed by this rhetoric his fists are walls of concrete, but in his heart is Japan’s endangered nature. Ando never tires of mentioning his environmental responsibilities so much so that at times it appears to be a make-good gesture for the millions of tons of concrete he’s poured into the landscape over a lifetime.
Ando’s critics hold his “stubbornness of style” against him he has never strayed from cement, as he has never deviated from his famous Liverpool-Beatles hairstyle. The critics claim his fetish construction material is a tool used to subjugate humans. On the contrary, European supporters like Giorgio Armani and Luciano Benetton feel at ease within Ando’s gray cement fortresses, though it must be acknowledged that these are fashion designers who want architecture to enhance their products, not compete with them. (They are also wealthy Italians in a country famous for kidnappings, where a fortress at least subconsciously makes perfect sense). For other Europeans, praying or meditating in one of Ando’s churches whose walls might remind them of WWII bunkers could, indeed, feel like subjugation.
