Challenge Tadao Ando. Retrospective exhibition at the Center Pompidou

/ Architecture /
The exhibition, which will open on October 10 in Paris at the Center Georges Pompidou, will present an overview of 50 large projects of Tadao Ando - sketches, drawings, original models and photographs.

The organizers of the retrospective divided the projects into four categories: space, urban challenge, landscape and dialogue with history.

Architect Tadao Ando and his Church of the Light - Church of the Light, Osaka

"I create my architecture by asking myself how to make things that will forever remain imprinted in people's souls."

- this is how Pritzker laureate Tadao Ando spoke about one of his most famous works - Church of the Light, built in 1999 in Osaka.

The retrospective will allow not only to summarize information about different periods in Tadao Ando's career, but also to tell about the beginnings - about the architect's search for his original path. Why did a professional boxer suddenly leave the sport and immerse himself in the study of architecture, and already in 1969 he opened his own office, Tadao Ando Architects & Associates? Perhaps the answer lies in travel notes and photographs taken by Tadao himself, which have never been shown in Europe until now.

Buddha temple in Sapporo. Tadao Ando hid a colossal Buddha statue right in the lavender hill. The sculpture, which is the center of the composition and the heart of the complex located at the Makomanai Takino Memorial Cemetery, was completed a year and a half ago. Today, a viewer approaching it along a wide concrete road can see only the head of a stone sculpture, hidden in a well in the center of an artificial embankment, completely covered with purple lavender flowers from June to September. Photo: Shigeo Ogawa/Makomanai Takinoreien Cemetery

To see the Buddha in its entirety, it is necessary to walk through a 40-meter tunnel at the base of the hill and find yourself in a sun-drenched prayer hall with textured corrugated concrete walls that taper upward. "Since the statue cannot be fully seen from the outside, a person's fantasy is spontaneously activated. The visitor passes ideas through himself and plunges deeper into emotions that change depending on the season," says the author of the project. Photo: Shigeo Ogawa/Makomanai Takinoreien Cemetery

The central part of the exhibition tadao ando: the challenge will be the installation "Naoshima", which will tell about the dialogue, play and interaction of architectural objects created by Tadao Ando with the landscape and nature of the island of Naoshima.

Chichu Art Museum on the island of Naoshima, built in 2004 according to the project of Tadao Ando. Photo: tadao ando architect & associates

And if the secret of polished concrete given by Tadao Ando is simple and lies in varnished formwork, then the question of the attractiveness of the Japanese architect's "radical regionalism" for Europeans and Americans and the limits of this "regionalism" requires reflection.

Row House model, 1976, Japan. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian

Model Rokko Housing I & II, 1983 & 1993, Japan. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian

Shibuya Project model, 1985. Photo: Tomio Ohashi

Nakanoshima Project drawing, 1989. Image source: Tadao Ando Architect & Associates