Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum
To suggest that there is something "beyond minimalism" as the title of the Royal Academy's new architectural exhibition on Tadao Ando avers, is to play with semantics. "Beyond" in what way, exactly? Is the work of the master Japanese architect even more minimalist than we could possibly imagine? Does it, like a visual equivalent of a late Samuel Beckett play, abstract itself into invisibility? Or do they mean "beyond" in the sense of having got over some kind of hurdle?
The RA is, in fact, being rather clever. It knows that minimalism is a cult style of the moment, to be found in reams of interiors magazines and supplements. Every other block of loft apartments claims that it is designed by some cutting-edge minimalist or other. But usually this just comes down to lots of bare floor, white walls, a sunken bathtub, and an abstemious approach to loose furnishings. It is thought to be a bit Japanesey, so there'll probably be a raked-gravel Zen garden in there somewhere. Season it with just a dash of good-looking and preferably pale clutter and the style works in hotels, shops, anywhere. But all that is just fashion - what's it got to do with Tadao Ando?
Not a lot. "The essence of minimalism is simplicity, but simplicity without depth is merely cheap. It is not enough," says Ando, sitting with his interpreter at a plain timber trestle table in a spare gallery at the RA as workmen rush to get his exhibition ready for opening that same evening. "You have to think deeply about the materials, the space, and so forth. I hope to achieve simplicity, but I also hope to achieve depth."
Ando, now in his late fifties and garlanded with prizes, is a self-taught architect who was once a professional boxer, and still has a broken nose to prove it. This surreal career shift would surely be impossible in the West. In the 1970s and 1980s, he evolved a way of working that has produced some of the simplest and most lyrical buildings in the world today - especially houses, churches, temples, museums and art galleries. All Ando buildings, irrespective of their function, are temples of one kind or another: consider the 1995 Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, sunk into its National Park setting, where sky and water are mirrored through a central, cloister-like, oval courtyard. He does not deny the charge. "I believe it is important that architecture should be a space where you feel spiritually empowered. To have particular 'styles' is somehow missing the point. There is a universality to the human spirit that is constant, that should run through all that."
This comes from a Buddhist who claims to have no particularly strong religious belief. Two of his best works to date, for instance, are Christian churches in Japan. In both, the form of the cross is dominant. The centrepiece of the RA exhibition, designed by architect Michael Stiff, is a complete mock-up, two-thirds scale, of the Church of the Light (1989, Osaka). As you enter the show, you come face to face with the famous glowing cruciform window, formed from the gap left between the four panels of the church's end wall. Here, the interior is painted a matt grey but in real life it is of glimmering, polished concrete, a Japanese speciality that Ando has elevated to sublimity.
