The Simplicity of Simplicity
I saw Tadao Ando speak at the GSD last night. Standing-room-only, plus simulcast in two classrooms. I was squozen near the front of Piper among some rather smelly people so I decided to bail. On the way out I passed Toshiko and The Man and snapped a spy pic (see spy pic). And then I noticed that they were showing the lecture in 109. What the heck, I thought, there's nothing on tv tonight anyway.
I'd never heard him speak before, but I suspected that there was nothing he could say that would make his architecture better. After a few minutes my suspicion turned into conviction, his translator delivering every platitude in earnest deadpan. His comments actually sounded like his buildings: simple, plain, unassaultable, perhaps a little dumb. His lowest, most idiotic moment of the evening came in the form of advice to students, which went something like, "I like the ice skating at Rockefeller Plaza in the winter, so I'm putting ice skating on the lake in my current project. My advice to you is, keep feeding yourself the nutrition of other architecture so you can use them in your own projects." Wow.
He managed to clear something up for me, though. For some time now I've been skeptical of the legend that he's a self-taught architect. After looking at his work a little closer, however, it's really not very hard to believe. He put up a slide of 16 study models for one of his projects in which the existing site has a pond and some old houses--basically a wide open site with an irregularly shaped body of water. His studies were comprised of "bar? semi-circle? bar with semi-circle? semi-circle with bar?" and so on. And then he bumped up the silly with, "I went through many possibilities for this project and at one point almost gave up out of frustration." Then came the earnest advice: "So you should stick to it, don't give up."
He also let slip some of his legendary insensitivity while describing the art island project in Naoshima. There were some local village houses that were being acquired to be used as galleries, and he stopped on one slide to tell the story of the 85-year-old grandma who refused to give up her house for art. His conclusion: "She's old, it's only a matter of time before we get that house." Even simulcast, we could hear the scandalized murmurs racing through Piper. He tried to smooth it over with a bizarre observation, "As an architect you never know what will happen. In two years it could be a gallery or it could be someone's home." I kinda wish he remained unapologetic about it, though. Everyone loves a bad guy.
All criticism aside, I'm still a fan of his work. At his best, of course, his formal purity really works. Near the end of the lecture he showed his
proposal for the World Trade Center site, a massive dome of earth for people to gather on. The dome represents just a fragment of a much larger sphere, a reference to New York itself. Now
that's simplicity you can sink your teeth into.
* Ray, 9/25/2003 09:58:07 AM
