"When I design buildings, I think of the overall composition, much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that, I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space"
About this Quote
Ando frames architecture as anatomy, and it is a revealing choice: not the machine metaphor of high modernism, not the “icon” language of branding, but a body with organs that must cooperate. “Overall composition” signals discipline and restraint, the belief that a building’s power comes from proportion, sequence, and silence as much as from any single gesture. The body comparison also smuggles in a moral claim. Bodies aren’t optional; they have coherence or they fail. Ando is arguing, politely, against buildings that perform like billboards while ignoring what it feels like to inhabit them.
The second sentence shifts from the object to the encounter. He’s not only designing a form to be admired; he’s choreographing arrival, the tiny psychology of approach: where your eyes land, how your pace changes, when you’re allowed to “enter” versus when you’re made to wait. That’s classic Ando - concrete as calm, light as a material, thresholds as narrative. In his churches, museums, and houses, the walk to the door can be as composed as the room inside, often using narrowing paths, walls that conceal, and sudden openings to make perception feel earned.
Context matters: Ando is largely self-taught, emerging in postwar Japan while absorbing both Japanese spatial tradition and Western modernism. This quote reads like a manifesto against spectacle architecture: craft over flash, experience over image, and a reminder that buildings meet us not in photographs but at human speed, with human bodies doing the sensing.
The second sentence shifts from the object to the encounter. He’s not only designing a form to be admired; he’s choreographing arrival, the tiny psychology of approach: where your eyes land, how your pace changes, when you’re allowed to “enter” versus when you’re made to wait. That’s classic Ando - concrete as calm, light as a material, thresholds as narrative. In his churches, museums, and houses, the walk to the door can be as composed as the room inside, often using narrowing paths, walls that conceal, and sudden openings to make perception feel earned.
Context matters: Ando is largely self-taught, emerging in postwar Japan while absorbing both Japanese spatial tradition and Western modernism. This quote reads like a manifesto against spectacle architecture: craft over flash, experience over image, and a reminder that buildings meet us not in photographs but at human speed, with human bodies doing the sensing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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