Günter Figal - Ando

modo

To truly understand architecture, you must experience space with all your five senses.

Preliminary Note

This book is the result of perceptual contemplation – more precisely, of exploring Tadao Ando’s buildings during a lengthy stay in Japan, in the fall and winter of 2016 / 17. Initial ideas and phrases arose from viewing the photographs I had taken of Ando’s buildings, and also of temples and temple gardens in Kyoto, Nara, and Uji. To this extent, the photographs included in this book are not mere illustrations. Rather, they form a text preceding the written text – an initial structuring and fixation of visual experience that initiated conceptual reflection and description. Furthermore, the perceptual photographic and descriptive contemplation of Ando’s architecture has motivated me to take up and rethink questions that have been important to me for a long time. So I have learned from Ando’s buildings how the question of space could be related to the question of how to conceive the essence of modernity. The buildings answered these questions, and I had nothing to do other than understand the answer.

It is with great pleasure that I wish to express my gratitude to those who have contributed to the genesis of the book. First of all and as always, I am grateful to my wife, Antonia Egel. As in everything, here, too, we shared experience and reflection. Many others opened doors or made helpful suggestions, and thus improved the clarity of my ideas, or supported me otherwise. I would like to mention by name Hiroshi Asami, director of the Nishida Kitarô Museum of Philosophy; Toshihiko Hosotani, manager at Yumebutai Westin Hotel; Hans Peter Liederbach, who critically revised my text and attended to the correct writing of Japanese names; Mari Moh; Toshitaka Mochizuki; Keichi Nakano; Ichirô Nakata, director of Kanazu Elementary School; Ryosuke Ohashi; Kenichi Oishi, parish priest at Ibaraki Kasugaoka Church (Church of the Light); abbot Soen Ozeki, who allowed me to take pictures in the garden of his temple, Daisen-in, and to include a photograph of the ‘Ocean of Emptiness’ in this book; Bernhard Strauss, without whom my photographs would not have found the way from data files to prints; Dieter Weber, who designed this book and took it under his wing as publisher; and, finally, the Yamaguchi family, who allowed me to visit their tea house and take pictures. I am extraordinarily grateful to Tadao Ando for inviting us to his studio and, despite being in the midst of intense activity, took the time to engage in a wonderful conversation with us. However, it was Hideki Mine, our host at Kwansei Gakuin University, who propelled and made this book possible. Together we explored most of the buildings featured here. This book is dedicated to him in deep gratitude and friendship.

The English version of the book is not a direct translation. Though I kept it close to the German text, I felt free to diverge whenever I thought it fitting for the consistency and clarity of the English version. I am very grateful to Elizabeth Wener for the careful revision of my English text.

The Age of Space

When Michel Foucault, in a text from 1976 that has since become a classic, speculated that the nineteenth century, as the age of time and history, would be replaced by the age of space,[1] he could barely have guessed just how true this prediction would turn out to be. Historical categories that Foucault mentions, such as development and stagnation, crisis and circuit, and the accumulation of the past, are of scant importance for an actual understanding of the world. We are no longer bound to historical categories; neither do we feel the abundance of tradition as a burden or regard future as more important than the present. This becomes especially clear when contrasted with the period in which Foucault wrote his text, the time shortly before the fiercest eruption of historical and philosophical convictions concerning history after the Second World War, when many placed all bets on the future, and, in doing so, forgot how much this futurism was connected to the past, especially the nineteenth century. That has since changed radically. Orientation to time and history has faded to the extent that the possibility of new orientation has emerged. Who would seriously still doubt that the world is a spatial one, namely the space to which all continents of the earth belong and in which they belong together? The world is thus, as Foucault says, determined by nearness and remoteness, by distance and juxtaposition, by coexistence and separateness. These spatial tensions should be lived, if possible, free of conflict, because the conflicts of this world are not examples of the struggle of ‘progress’ against ‘reaction’, but rather contentions of powers competing, expanding, or self-isolating, following their interests – without philosophical legitimation, and in opposition to other convictions, without the promise of a ‘better future’.

Along with the idea of history as a progression towards a final aim, also comes the strange conviction according to which cultures, as stages of human development, might be arranged in a sequence. Cultures, one begins to understand, exist side by side, and if they want to do so for any length of time, they have to find out how this coexistence – which can only be achieved to varying degrees – can be lived. Accordingly, it is not the slowing down or stagnation of expected development that is to be feared, but rather that cultures and states are not learning how to tolerate each other, or, if nothing else is possible, are at least putting up with one another’s otherness.

Foucault did not intend his considerations to only be specific to his own time. Neither did he wish to declare the experience of space as something new – as if one had just recently noticed that life takes place in space. If it nevertheless makes sense to follow Foucault and designate the present as the age of space, this must mean that the experience of space has now become more conscious, more attentive and, as Foucault indicates, also more exigent. For instance, in order to answer to the question of how to recognize the diversity of coexisting cultures and traditions, considerations concerning the notion of ‘side by side’ as determination of space should be helpful – admittedly without guarantee of success, but at least as a contribution to clarifying how it might be possible to live alongside one another.

One could assume that considerations of this kind have been put forward for quite some time, or even that they dominate current discussions. If the present age really is the age of space, then it should also be an age of the experiencing of space that is particularly intense and reflected, and one in which recent philosophy should have strived towards in its understanding of space in an especially thorough manner. This, however, is obviously not the case. There are only a few thinkers Foucault refers to, and still fewer he could call on to support or justify his considerations. In regarding the world as space, Foucault seems to be quite isolated, although perhaps not completely.

As a result, Foucault’s considerations are tentative initial explorations, which are nonetheless substantiated by an overruling idea. As Foucault states, we do not live in empty let alone homogenous space, but rather in space entirely charged with qualities, amidst an ensemble of relations that define placements and are irreducible to each other. Space, if this were so, would be determined by related and connected places that, in turn, could be understood with reference to whatever has found, is finding, or can find its place within them. Space, then, would be the space of places, and places are what they are because someone or something was found or can be found there. First and foremost, Foucault concretizes his understanding of spaces by referring to ‘counter placements’ (contre-emplacement) that receive something which, for whatever reason, could not find a place in the normal space of everyday life. Foucault calls these places ‘heterotopies’ (heterotopies), thinking of places that in the normal web of relations and placements are like islands – barracks, prisons, cemeteries, gardens, libraries, museums, or holiday camps. As with places in general, the ‘other spaces’ that give Foucault’s essay its title, are also solely determined by their quality of meaning. However, in contrast to the meaning of normal spaces, the meaning of these spaces is ‘exclusive’ in a literal sense, because it is defined by not being included in the meaning of normal places. It is very likely that Foucault regards heterotopies as the clearest manifestations of space, namely of the interior and exterior, and of closedness as opposed to openness.

Foucault’s conception of space has been widely effective, probably not least because it is easy to understand. In seeking to understand and to explain what space is, one will almost automatically think of places. Whereas space is difficult to comprehend, places are simple to grasp. They are concretely determined, especially if they are, like Foucault’s heterotopies, special, i.e., exclusive places in a literal sense. Places, it may be repeated, are places for something or for someone. One can refer to them by saying what they are places for, and by determining where this ‘something’ is or can be – a vase on a table, a book on a bookshelf, or in a briefcase. Places can also be determined by indicating whom or what they are or could be intended for. Either way, places are factually or possibly related to something other than themselves. Something, for instance, a table, a bookshelf, or a briefcase, is only a place inasmuch as it can receive something in its own particular way. So places are different from the featureless indeterminacy that Foucault associates with the idea of empty space. Places are concrete. They are not emptiness in which living beings and things would levitate like stars or space stations in outer space.

Foucault is not the only one to have reservations concerning the idea of space as emptiness. Aristotle, too, took exception to the idea of emptiness and made attempts to prove the idea nonsensical. Neither is Foucault’s conception of space as a web of relations something new. Leibniz, as he wrote in a letter to Samuel Clarke on August 18, 1716, is convinced that he demonstrated space as being nothing other than the order of the existence of things that is perceived as simultaneity. But however difficult the idea of space as emptiness may be, the alternative favoured by Leibniz and Foucault is not readily intelligible, either. Though Leibniz’s term ‘simultaneity’ as a determination of space, likewise adopted by Foucault, may at first sound plausible, a closer look reveals the term to be problematic, because it determines space as a special case of temporal relation. Simultaneity is contemporaneity; the term indicates ‘being at the same time’, and not successively. If this were a determination of space in its essence, then only things being at the same time could be spatial, whereas things being at different times would not be spatial, and merely determined by the succession of time.

This, however, is impossible. Nothing temporal can exist without being essentially spatial. How, for instance, should one know that something called ‘past’ once factually existed, if not in reference to the place where it was – to a place that is still there, but without whatever has come to pass, or only with traces of it? ‘Here it was’ – this proves that something factually existed, and has not merely been imagined or invented. That which cannot be allocated to a particular place cannot have existed at all. Likewise, something can only be possible in the future if there is a place at which it could be real. Something without a possible place cannot possibly be. Without possible reality it is ‘utopian’, meaning ‘without place’.

The temporal is thus understood in reference to space, and, accordingly, space cannot be understood by reducing it to time. Speaking of simultaneity, Leibniz leaves the question concerning the essence of space unanswered, while Foucault fails to get beyond indications. Rather offhandedly, he speaks of nearness and remoteness, of being side by side, and apart. These are undoubtedly expressions indicating spatiality, but what is the space indicated by them? Is this space, in contrast to Foucault’s assumption, emptiness?

It is difficult to answer these questions. At some level, space is certainly intelligible. By living in space and living spatially, it is inevitable that one has already understood this, but mostly without being able to explicate such understanding, perhaps because space is not an object and in no way comparable to one. Space is non-objective and thus eludes direct attempts to determine and describe it. Accordingly, attempts to grasp space conceptually and linguistically can only be indirect – they are orientated to linguistic and conceptual articulations of the spatial, and, being attentive to how these articulations can be reflected and conceived philosophically, they have thus hitherto been reflected and conceptually articulated in philosophy.[2]

But there is another and complementary option for clarifying space, namely by referring directly to the perceptible, and, as a consequence, having a chance to find ostensive clarification of pertinent considerations and descriptions. It is the opportunity to contemplate and reflect on architecture. Up till now, this option has only rarely been taken up philosophically, although it is almost self-evident. Whereas ‘space as such’, as soon as one begins meditating on it, can barely be grasped conceptually, architectural works can be experienced. Indeed, they are experienced daily, more or less explicitly. And such experience is always one of space. Architectural works, buildings, are not something ‘spatial’, somehow being ‘in space’ and intelligible without particular attention to their spatiality. Buildings are different. Unlike ‘things in space’, they are not only spatial, but rather spaces, built spaces – and how would it be possible to build spaces without considering space at all and without space becoming manifest? This holds especially true for houses in a broad sense, both representative and those that can be inhabited, but also for gardens, for recreational places and sports stadiums, for streets and bridges. By sojourning in houses one is in a particular space and experiences its own particular character, most likely in its connection with other spaces.

Furthermore, one experiences that houses are specifically related to the space they have been erected in. Houses, like gardens, are doublings of space; they are space, and they need space. What space is becomes especially clear through this doubling. In order to understand the space of buildings, particularly those one can sojourn in, one would only have to experience them with one’s senses and, after conceptual reflection, describe what has been experienced. This would in turn lead to an adequate understanding of buildings. If buildings are particular spaces, and thus, too, essentially space, only by considering their space-character can buildings be adequately understood.

Buildings as and in Space

As to the space-character of buildings, one may first think of what is most obvious and accordingly dominates the considerations pertinent to Foucault’s essay: buildings are places. As places, they receive people so they can sojourn in them, whether with different purposes or without any particular aim, simply occupying them, and in such a way that is essential to human life. Such buildings also receive things that are to be kept or stored in them, things necessary for realising diverse purposes and, first and foremost, items for furnishing houses so that they are habitable.

Buildings are places. However, it is not their place-character that enables diverse activities to take place in them and lets things find an accessible place in them. Buildings do not only receive, they also allow. Not only are they places, they also offer free space that allows specific ways of habitation to be realised. In offering free space, they themselves must be free spaces – to be lived in, worked in, taught and learned in, but also as spaces for leisure that allow rest and reposeful reflection. Admittedly, at least some of these ways of conducting life do not have to be realised in buildings alone, or buildings built for an explicit purpose. However, even buildings not created for specific activities must nevertheless also have the capacity to allow these to take place, while purpose-built buildings will, of course, support and favour the activities they were designed for. Many potential ways of life are, however, bound to the particular free spaces buildings offer. How, for instance, is one to produce something skillfully without a workshop or studio containing all the necessary tools? Effective research is dependent on libraries that provide all the literature needed, or on laboratories that provide the instruments necessary for scientific work. If one considers diverse buildings that support or allow certain activities as a whole, a clear view of the type of use and form of life will emerge. An ensemble of buildings, such as a village, a town, or a city, enables a particular way of life that although it is not homogenous in its entirety, encompasses manifold possibilities not reducible to a particular whole.

Buildings are places and free spaces. Yet this is not sufficient to determine their space-character: buildings are always limited in size and thus have a particular range, extension, and spaciousness or, to introduce a general term for all these characters, a particular wideness. Their boundaries can be more or less closed, consisting of either walls without doors and windows, or featuring open passages and glass facings. Whatever the case, the demarcations of a building separate interiors from exteriors, and so constitute the building’s particular inner scope – its wideness. The extent of an interior’s wideness will determine the distance that is possible between people and objects. And so the limitations of a building’s inner scope will enable people and objects to be distanced from one another to a greater or lesser extent.

However, as places, free spaces, and structures of limited wideness, buildings are not to be regarded as isolated. Not only are they places, they are also located at places. Having been erected somewhere, they can only be experienced in connection with the place they belong to and in relation to other buildings located at varying distances. Furthermore, buildings do not only offer free space, they also need free space. Without free space, they could not have been erected; there must have been ‘enough space’ available to build them. Likewise, they need free space in order to be accessible, and they also can only be visible with free space around them. Finally, buildings are not only of limited wideness, but are also placed in wideness – in varying distance to other buildings, either restricted in their outlook or positioned in such a way that they have an open view of the horizon.

Buildings, particularly those that stand at a particular place, in free space and of a certain wideness determine the space they come to occupy. Erecting a building somewhere changes that place. It is no longer a simple place, but is now twofold; one can only be at this place while in the building that has been built on the site or by being close to it. A building as place, on the other hand, is determined by the place at which it was erected; by being in this building, one sojourns at the building’s place. This place belongs to the place-character of a building, and at best a building harmonises with the place where it has been built. It will then accentuate this place in a way specific to the building and impossible without it. Likewise, a building belongs to the free space it needs. Sojourning in a house or a garden one will at once experience the free space offered by the building and the free space the building needs. Conversely, this free space is dominated by the building in such a way that it cannot be experienced without the building. Also, the limited wideness of a building belongs to the wideness in which the building is situated. This wideness determines the building, and conversely the building has changed it, for instance through its limitedness. The open space in which a building was erected can appear with the building as less open or, being viewed in contrast to the limited wideness of a building, the wideness of a landscape can appear even wider.

The characterizations of doubled space outlined apply to every building, regardless of its architectural quality. These characteristics are, however, especially relevant for buildings that are works of art. This is the case simply because art as such cannot do without reflecting the particular conditions of artistic production. Accordingly, the space-character of architectural works of art should be especially evident. No building could have artistic character without possessing a distinct character of space that significantly determines experience of it. Architectural works of art, in contrast to normal buildings, can thus be expected to define and intensify the evidence of being at a place, in free space, and in limited wideness. Very likely, however, this specific evidence will hardly be just a confirmation – as if one somehow knew the character of place, free space and wideness, and architectural artworks would only make this knowledge explicit without essential modification. Art is surprising, especially if it does not intend to surprise and, at least in the first moment, has no effects normally understood as ‘surprising’. Art can surprise gradually, possibly not be understood as surprising in the first instance, but then become even more so in a lasting manner. In experiencing an artwork, one begins to reflect, not least on the cogency of concepts accepted as plausible up till then, one perhaps realises that these concepts are in need of revision. Thus, motivated by architectural artworks, the understanding of place, free space, and wideness can begin anew, leading to new conceptually reflective descriptions. Experiencing buildings, one then will realise that space as place, free space, and wideness can be described as if matters of course and presuppositions would never have been relevant. Architectural art would therefore enable a fresh and unbiased understanding of space.

Ando

Modern architecture is especially illuminating for understanding space, because it faces up to the challenge of designing and constructing space in a remarkably reflected way. For modern architecture, building explicitly is building space. Frank Lloyd Wright, the founder of modern architecture, programmatically claimed not to define a house any longer by its walls as its limitations, but rather to construct rooms as possibilities of space and thus enable a clear experience of space through his buildings.[3] According to this, Wright seeks to avoid rigid borderlines between interior and exterior, and – mainly by using large windows and glass doors, and by extending inhabited space to terraces – thus transform the habitable space of a house from an ensemble of clearly separated rooms to a sequence of fluid transitions. Architects after Wright adopted this programme, although to varying degrees of consistency and with their own interpretations of it.

When it comes to consistency and independence, Tadao Ando’s architecture is so striking that it is as if Ando intended to realise Wright’s programme as clearly as possible. Ando’s buildings that follow Wright’s suit are not supposed to impress with sculptural gestures or emphatic features. Indeed, some of his buildings are either partially hidden in the ground or completely subterranean, so that they cannot be contemplated like sculptures, but only experienced as rooms and as space. All these buildings are understated and as such, are to a lesser extent spatial forms, but mainly space forms, and therefore formed space. As a result, Ando’s buildings reflect the space they are built in. They are like answers to their places, to the free spaces they need and likewise to wideness, for instance, the wideness of a landscape or the narrowness of a suburban street. Nonetheless, Ando’s buildings are not absorbed by their surroundings. Though mostly inconspicuous, some of them even hidden so that one could overlook them, they are by no means unremarkable. Being simple, they are strong; with their vitreous transparency, their pale shades of grey, and clear forms they are distinctly present as buildings. And though most of Ando’s buildings resemble each other, they are still unique individuals. Ando does not design each building as something completely new, not as solitaires, as Peter Zumthor, for instance, does. Notwithstanding, each of Ando’s buildings is a singular space form and as such cannot be confused with others.