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he thrives on. The first building that Ando designed after forming his own studio was the Tomishima House in Osaka. He has stated, “I walled in the site along its periphery to create an inner sanctuary undisturbed by the noise of the surroundings.” Osaka, like other Japanese cities, is very densely populated, and houses tend to be tiny by Western standards. It is very much in the logic of this context that Ando emphasized privacy in this first work, as he often has in the houses that followed Tomishima. The bustling city of Osaka, Ando’s birthplace, is an inevitable part of his thinking, but from the beginning, he willfully closes out this reality in favor of privacy created by thick walls and openings that are more likely to look skyward than toward the city. Concrete and Sun Ando’s concept of nature may deserve some explanation. For a casual observer, concrete, Ando’s favorite construction material, can seem cold and anything but natural. Cast with the quality seen in his Japanese works, concrete does not resemble the substance seen in other parts of the world. It is smooth and even “soft” to the touch, curiously radiating a warmth that those who have not experienced the quality of Japanese construction can only imagine. But where does nature enter the Tomishima House? A central atrium provides much of the response. The light that falls through this opening is in some sense the real substance of Ando’s architecture. “This direct light softens as it descends through the staggered floor levels,” Ando says, “accommodating bedroom, living room, and dining room—giving a natural rhythm to life within the sanctuary of the building’s blank enclosing walls.” In the great city where there is little room for green spaces, Ando sublimates nature and brings it into his architecture in the form of light or breeze. Ando first came to the attention of architectural circles with another small residence in Osaka, the Sumiyoshi Row House (1976) in the southern part of the city. His design here is a bold combination of strict modernity expressed in a blank concrete facade whose only opening is a doorway, and whose form owes much to Japanese tradition. The deep, narrow site forcibly corresponds to those of neighboring houses, although strict geometry may be more the rule here than in older residences. Black slate floors and concrete walls also impose a contemporary kind of austerity to the interior. The plan is divided into three equal rectangles containing a living space at ground level and a bedroom above it on the street side. The rearmost volume houses a kitchen and bathroom on the bottom floor with a guest room above it. The central void is open to the sky with a bridge linking front and back, and a stairway leading up from
this central courtyard. Residents have no choice but to go outside to pass from the front to the back of the house. Here, not only light and breeze enter Ando’s equation, but so might rain. Though his solid concrete walls create an intimate, protected atmosphere in the house, nature is present, as is Japanese tradition, which often adopts the solution of this kind of open court.
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Architecture and Place Another milestone in the career of Ando is the Koshino House (1979, 1990 [addition]), located in the fashionable hills of Ashiya, near Kobe. Built for the well-known fashion designer Junko Koshino, the house is on a different scale than Ando’s earlier efforts, with a floor area more than 5,920 square feet (550 sq. m), very generous by Japanese standards. Set on a wooded, green hillside, the structure occupies more than half of the 6,580-square-foot (611 sq. m) site; the architect has again used his smooth concrete walls to provide privacy to the owners, closing the street-side facade and opening the house to its natural setting and the sunlight that both filters and flows in. Ando states, “Taking on the generous nature of the local environment, and a program with a high degree of freedom, we aimed to generate a relationship between architecture and place that allowed the architecture to have autonomy while acting in concert with the surrounding natural environment.” Composed essentially of two concrete rectangles, the house was modified by Ando in 1984 with the addition of a fan-shaped volume originally intended as an atelier. Ando’s enlargement of the Koshino House demonstrates another frequent theme in his designs: a continued presence that readily admits the idea of growth and change, despite the so-called complete nature of the original structures. In the case of the Koshino House, which benefits from an attractive natural setting, which had been absent in his early Osaka residences, Ando further develops the theme of a relation to nature, expressed in this house by views out to the verdant landscape. He explains, “Such things as light and wind only have meaning when they are introduced inside a house in a form cut off from the outside world. The isolated fragments of light and air suggest the entire natural world. The forms I have created have altered and acquired meaning through elementary nature (light and air) that give indications of the passage of time and the changing of the seasons.” The Hill and the Grid Though Ando’s Rokko apartment buildings in Kobe are of a dif-
ferent type than his private houses, they illustrate many of the © 2013 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.
Kidosaki House
© 2013 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved. Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan