"There is a role and function for beauty in our time"
About this Quote
Ando’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to an age that treats aesthetics as optional garnish, the first thing “value engineering” shaves off when spreadsheets get nervous. Coming from an architect who built a global reputation on bare concrete, calibrated light, and disciplined emptiness, it’s not a plea for prettiness. It’s a claim that beauty does work.
The intent is pointed: “role and function” borrows the language of utilitarianism, then smuggles beauty back into the room as a legitimate instrument. Ando has spent decades arguing, through buildings more than manifestos, that the sensory and the spiritual aren’t luxuries; they’re infrastructure for attention. Beauty, in this framing, regulates the psyche the way good urban planning regulates traffic. It can slow you down, reorient you, make room for contemplation in environments engineered for speed and consumption.
The subtext is also defensive. Modernism’s legacy has been caricatured as cold efficiency; late capitalism’s architecture often delivers spectacle without care. Ando threads the needle: restraint as an antidote to visual noise, material honesty as moral posture. Beauty becomes a form of ethical resistance, insisting that public life deserves moments of dignity even when budgets, timelines, and politics reward the disposable.
Context matters: postwar Japan’s rapid rebuilding, the erasure and replacement of neighborhoods, the rise of generic global cities. In that churn, Ando’s work treats light, shadow, and silence as civic resources. The sentence is modest on the surface, but it’s a manifesto: beauty is not a bonus feature of our time; it’s one of the few tools we have to make our time livable.
The intent is pointed: “role and function” borrows the language of utilitarianism, then smuggles beauty back into the room as a legitimate instrument. Ando has spent decades arguing, through buildings more than manifestos, that the sensory and the spiritual aren’t luxuries; they’re infrastructure for attention. Beauty, in this framing, regulates the psyche the way good urban planning regulates traffic. It can slow you down, reorient you, make room for contemplation in environments engineered for speed and consumption.
The subtext is also defensive. Modernism’s legacy has been caricatured as cold efficiency; late capitalism’s architecture often delivers spectacle without care. Ando threads the needle: restraint as an antidote to visual noise, material honesty as moral posture. Beauty becomes a form of ethical resistance, insisting that public life deserves moments of dignity even when budgets, timelines, and politics reward the disposable.
Context matters: postwar Japan’s rapid rebuilding, the erasure and replacement of neighborhoods, the rise of generic global cities. In that churn, Ando’s work treats light, shadow, and silence as civic resources. The sentence is modest on the surface, but it’s a manifesto: beauty is not a bonus feature of our time; it’s one of the few tools we have to make our time livable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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