An Investigation on Tadao Ando's Phenomenological Reflections

Although Tadao Ando never refers to phenomenology explicitly, concentrating on his numerous texts and writings reveals that his way of thinking on architecture implies some essential themes and concerns, which are fundamentally related to the “phenomenological discourse” in both philosophy and architecture. Concepts and ideas such as union of subject and object, space, body and movement, memory, corporeality, multi-sensory perception, etc. are all essential themes in Ando’s reflection on architecture, which point to the common concerns in phenomenological discourse of architecture. This essay first discovers Ando’s basic phenomenological concerns based on a thematic analysis of his writings and words through which his central phenomenological concerns and their similarities and differences with the ideas and thoughts of other phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau- Ponty, Norberg-Schultz, Pallasmaa, and Frampton are discovered. At the end, it is concluded that existing phenomenological reflections in Ando’s architectural thought and work are not the result of his systematic investigation and reading of theoretical texts about the philosophy of phenomenology, but rather they are more rooted in his personal state of mind, his way of learning and understanding architecture, his cultural background and attention to the Eastern-Japanese way of thinking, and to some extent studying the works of some architectural theoreticians like Norberg-Schulz and Frampton.