"I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future"
About this Quote
Ando’s line reads like a mission statement, but it’s really a quiet rebuke to spectacle architecture: the kind that asks you to admire, consume, and leave unchanged. “Use their own resources” lands with deliberate ambiguity. On the surface it’s practical - local materials, local labor, local climate intelligence. Underneath, it’s psychological. Ando wants buildings that don’t do the feeling for you. They’re frames for attention, not substitutes for it.
That maps cleanly onto his signature discipline: poured-in-place concrete, controlled daylight, water, and emptiness that isn’t emptiness so much as calibrated room for the visitor’s senses to wake up. The “resource” is often the person inside the space - their patience, their movement, their capacity to notice how light drags across a wall or how a corridor resets your breathing. In an Ando building, inspiration is rarely delivered as a grand gesture; it’s extracted through experience.
The future he’s pointing to isn’t a sci-fi aesthetic. It’s a cultural future where progress isn’t measured by novelty or imported luxury, but by how intelligently we adapt what we already have. Coming from a self-taught architect who rose in postwar Japan and built a global reputation without abandoning restraint, the line also carries autobiography: self-reliance as ethos. Ando’s most persuasive argument is that modernity can be austere, local, and still feel like transcendence.
That maps cleanly onto his signature discipline: poured-in-place concrete, controlled daylight, water, and emptiness that isn’t emptiness so much as calibrated room for the visitor’s senses to wake up. The “resource” is often the person inside the space - their patience, their movement, their capacity to notice how light drags across a wall or how a corridor resets your breathing. In an Ando building, inspiration is rarely delivered as a grand gesture; it’s extracted through experience.
The future he’s pointing to isn’t a sci-fi aesthetic. It’s a cultural future where progress isn’t measured by novelty or imported luxury, but by how intelligently we adapt what we already have. Coming from a self-taught architect who rose in postwar Japan and built a global reputation without abandoning restraint, the line also carries autobiography: self-reliance as ethos. Ando’s most persuasive argument is that modernity can be austere, local, and still feel like transcendence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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