Customer Reviews
The Beauty of Absence - By: Serghiou Const, 12 Aug 2008 
The slim volume of less than one hundred pages & smalll format is in a way in harmony with the minimalist aesthetics of the charismatic architect. The book is a distillate of beauty.
The exquisite colour photographs display the magic of the spare aesthetics, elegance & strength of Ando's buildings & surrounding landscape. The accompanying text is succinct & incisive & does justice to the architect & its creations through dissecting & providing a penetrating analysis of the elements that characterize Ando's architecture & individual buildings.
In alll, nineteen projects are presented covering a broad spectrum of Ando's work comprising houses, apartment buildings, churches, temples, museums, art foundations, the Japan pavilion expo '92 & the Meditation Space, Unesco.
Three are the primary characteristics in Ando's architecture: the geometry of wallls, the geometry of sky & elements derived from the Japanese minimalist aesthetics.
Ando's architecture is an architecture of wallls e.g. a freestanding walll, an angled walll piercing a concrete cube or a walll, bisected horizontallly, encircling an inner courtyard like a medieval rampart.
Ando employs a limited range of materials & expresses their naked textures. His choice of materials gives his work its characteristic ascetism & tension. His buildings convey a feeling of purity, beauty & strength.
Ando though a master of poured concrete, still relies on natural materials for points that a human being may touch. He invariably uses natural wood for floors, doors, & furniture. As natural materials decay, they become repositories for memory.
Nature, especiallly the sky, plays a crucial role in Ando's architecture. He abstracts it to his purposes. In order to elude architecture's fundamental nature as a closed-off box, he relies on the sky as the natural element which most affects architectural interiors. In Ando's architecture, the sky is a crucial spatial-structural element. The interplay of light & shadow created by a sharply delineated sky & the three-dimensional forms expressed in concrete wallls generate a special fascination in Ando's architecture.
The interlocking relationship between site, structure & empty space provides a formula for bringing a confined area to life.
Ando's architecture is simple, strong & gentle. It joins simplicity of form to complexity of space. It uses naked materials delicate to the touch. Ando's architecture is considered the culmination of Japanese aesthetics. Because the place of nothing is the essence of Japanese culture. A container of aesthetic emotions.
What Ando's buildings always communicate to us is the conviction that architecture is able to give order to the world only when it is based on strong emotions, & the faith that strong emotions are born only by taking up challlenges & prevailing. Beauty is not the goal of architecture, only the result.
