Wealth & Money Quote by Tadao Ando

A quiet lament disguised as an observation, Ando’s line lands like concrete: spare, unadorned, and heavy. He’s not moralizing about money so much as diagnosing a cultural narrowing, the way a society’s imagination shrinks when the dominant language becomes “economy and finance.” The phrase “more and more” does the real work: it’s incremental, almost resigned, suggesting drift rather than coup. No single villain, just a steady recalibration of priorities until the measurable crowds out the meaningful.

Coming from an architect, the subtext is pointed. Architecture is where values become physical facts. When finance takes the steering wheel, cities tilt toward what can be priced, optimized, and quickly monetized: luxury towers, branded districts, development that photographs well for investors. The slower, less profitable goods - public space, contemplative buildings, craft, durability, the dignity of everyday life - start to look like inefficiencies. Ando’s own work, with its disciplined minimalism and reverence for light, silence, and restraint, reads as a rebuttal to that worldview. He builds experiences that don’t scale neatly into quarterly returns.

The context is Japan’s late-20th-century arc: postwar growth, the bubble economy, its collapse, and the long hangover of risk management. Globally, it’s the same story: culture pressured to justify itself in spreadsheets. Ando’s sentence isn’t nostalgic; it’s a warning about what happens when the market stops being a tool and becomes the standard for reality.