Tadao Ando visited Yale on Oct. 11 as the first architect ever honored with a Chubb Fellowship -- but then, Ando is not an ordinary architect.
Introducing Ando at the Chubb Lecture, Cesar Pelli, former dean of the School of Architecture, described him this way: "He is a great artist for whom architecture is his means of expression."
Form, material, space and light "are always firmly under his control and always made to serve his artistic purpose," Pelli told the capacity audience in the McNeil Lecture Hall of the Yale Art Gallery. Ando's buildings combine modern sensibilities, he said, while "their soul seems to belong to ancient Japan."
All of Ando's buildings, said Pelli, have a sense of "place, geometry and nature. For him, nature does not mean nature as we know it, but an abstraction of nature, what he calls, sometimes, 'man-made' nature."
Although he is self-taught, Ando has earned acclaim worldwide. He first gained widespread recognition for his work with the completion of Row House, Sumiyoshi (Azuma), in Osaka, which won the Architectural Institute of Japan's Annual Prize in 1979. He won the 1995 Pritzker Prize -- the highest honor accorded in the world of architecture -- as well as the 1997 Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Gold Medal of the French Academy and virtually every art and architecture prize Japan can bestow.
Because Ando speaks little English, he gave his talk in Japanese and it was translated by one of his partners. He spoke of his debt to Yale's School of Architecture, where he was invited to be a visiting professor in 1987. That experience, he said, opened doors for him iwhen he returned to his home base in Kobe, Japan.
"In Japan, it's not very common for a person without academic degrees to practice architecture or become a professor," he said, adding, "Japanese society is not as dynamic or as brave as American society. It does not regularly embrace new things or new concepts. Today I am also a professor of architecture at the University of Tokyo. ... I always think that this is because I was invited to be a visiting professor of architecture at Yale."
His time spent on campus had other benefits as well, he said: "I have learned the spirit of living with freedom from American culture. I can see Japan more clearly because of my experience outside Japan, essentially my experience at Yale."
Addressing the students in his audience, Ando advised, "When you have a dream, hold onto it and try until you achieve it. That's what I tried to do. ... If you're brave enough to believe in your dream, everything can come true."
His own dream, he said, was to become an architect and create buildings in which "nature is an element that asks you to think of the things you don't see that exist around you."
Because he holds no formal degrees, Ando had a hard time launching his career when he began 30 years ago, he said. He detailed with considerable humor how he presented unsolicited designs to the city of Osaka for a public building with hanging gardens, and although he was rejected again and again, he refused to be discouraged.
The first house he was commissioned to build was a tiny, 500-square-foot concrete structure for a young couple and their child. Shortly after its completion, he was forced to buy it back from the clients when they discovered they were expecting twins. Ando expanded the building and converted it into his office. A series of slides revealed how the building grew from its original rectangular simplicity to its final graceful shape, with a sweeping curved roof and skylights. Outside, the building is concrete and glass. Inside, wooden bookshelves soar upward through the five-story atrium and "enclose people in books."
As the building was finished, a dog wandered onto the site. "People who work with design have to know living beings in order to understand architecture, and so I decided to keep the dog in the office," said Ando. He named it "Le Corbusier," in honor of the great French architect. "When I see the dog every day, it reminds me of the uncompromising way that Le Corbusier had always with his work."
Ando, too, has an unswerving vision. "Right from the first building that I built, I wanted to make things that we don't see but that exist around us -- air, water, light -- I want to make these evident with the architecture that I designed," he explained.
Ando spoke of some of his most famous buildings, including the Church of the Light in Osaka, in which light and shadow create the shape of a cross through small slits in the outer wall. "Light gives life to the space," he said.
The Kobe earthquake of 1995, in which 6,000 people died, altered the direction of his career. "After this earthquake, I asked myself, as an architect, what do we do to make people's lives better?" he said. "What can we do [in the wake of] an event like this?"
Ando started a scholarship fund for children orphaned by the disaster. He assembled sculptures donated by artists around the world and offered them to the city for a memorial park.
"As for me, art, music, literature ... are the things that make you think, that inspire you to live on as a human being. If you don't have the ability to be influenced or inspired by art ... then it's very difficult to live on."
The Chubb Fellowship is devoted to encouraging and aiding Yale students interested in the operations of government and in public service. Established in 1936 through the generosity of Hendon Chubb (Yale 1895), the program is based in Timothy Dwight College. Among former Chubb Fellows have been international heads of state Fernando Collor de Mello of Brazil and Shimon Peres of Israel; Presidents George H. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter; and authors Norman Mailer and Octavio Paz.
-- By Gila Reinstein
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