The remarkable thing about Tadao Ando’s architecture is that it uses an everlasting material to reflect the transience of our way of life. Confronting the drift of a society obsessed with efficiency and consumerism, Tadao Ando questions what is taken for granted. In doing so, his work is consistent with a logic of resilience thinking.
Acknowledging the intertwined relationships between our social models and our environment, concrete transcends its basic state to inspire a philosophical dimension of impermanence. Inherent in Shintoism, rooted in the Japanese way of life, it bridges the gap between individual and urban resilience. Not that one necessarily leads to the other. (Fukushima will always remind us that urban resilience is inextricably linked to political decisions). But it is into the realm of the foundations of our society that Tadao Ando takes us. His architecture finds its balance between forces that ultimately cancel each other out, putting the question before the dogma and reminding us of a collective responsibility that goes far beyond a carbon footprint.
The series below comprises six triptychs, each showing a photograph of Tadao Ando’s work framed by two photographs of everyday life in Osaka. Each photograph of Tadao Ando’s work includes a piece of argentic paper that darkens over time, like a metaphorical narrative reminding us of the transience and fragility of our environment.
(Shooting places: Osaka, Naoshima island, Japan (A3 size x 3))
