For Tadao Ando, the self-taught architect maverick, drawing is thinking. Known for austere yet elegant concrete buildings with knife-sharp edges, Ando brings his ideas to life with just a few freehand pencil lines and an energetically scribbled tornado of a single pastel color.
Glimpses of this wild artistic sensibility appear throughout monographs on Ando¡¯s work, and his hand-drawings have been shown in exhibitions before ¡ª most recently this summer in ¡°Youth¡± in his hometown of Osaka, and earlier in the sweeping ¡°Tadao Ando: Endeavors¡± at the National Art Center, Tokyo, in 2017. published by Taschen last month, flips the script. It focuses solely on his rough architectural sketches, drawings, and a few plans and photos. It¡¯s an unconventional monograph of architecture in that it highlights the process and ideas instead of polished results, while also celebrating the now-declining craft of hand-drawn architectural illustration.
¡°For me ... exquisite computer-graphic expressions do not have sufficient strength to become the genesis of a new era,¡± Ando, 84, writes in the book¡¯s foreword. ¡°Instead, I am more attracted to the cobbled-together study models and rough line sketches that are generated in the process of struggling to arrive at these shapes.¡±
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