Inaugurated during Milan’s Salone del Mobile, The Challenge is the first exhibition at Armani/Silos dedicated to architecture.

A successful couple, with a professional relationship that comes from afar. Giorgio Armani himself has long had a penchant for Tadao Ando’s work, having commissioned him to create the nearby Armani Theatre almost two decades ago. And other hand, Ando sees a natural affinity between his own aesthetic philosophy and that of the famed fashion designer and says: ‘We both appreciate quality in materials and simplicity in expression.’

“I wish to create an architecture that will live on eternally – not in substance or form, but as a memory within people’s hearts.”
Tadao Ando

The narrative journey through the exhibition – designed by Tadao Ando in collaboration with Centre Pompidou – showcases the career of the Japanese architect that has distinguished himself for his original use of nature and the combination of elements like water and light in designed spaces.

"In 1998 I received a call from Giorgio Armani," recalls Japanese architect Tadao Ando (Osaka, 1941). "I wanted him to transform the old Nestlé factory in Milan into a theater with capacity for a thousand people. A week later, he showed me the place personally." The building was inaugurated as Teatro / Armani in 2001 and is one of the 50 projects included in The challenge, the retrospective on Ando's work that is presented in the Armani / Silos museum, located in front of the theater. The exhibition will cover the five decades of Tadao Ando's career.

The exhibition is structured around four major themes: Primitive Shapes of Space, An Urban Challenge, Landscape Genesis, Dialogues with History.

The exhibition is a testament of sensibility. Entitled ‘The Challenge’, the show unfolds in a series of darkened rooms and uses exquisite models, videos and shop drawings to track Ando’s career from its unlikely beginnings through to its most recent triumphs. ‘I was never trained as an architect,’ Ando points out, and ‘The Challenge’ documents the process of self-education that shaped the designer early on, mapping his global peregrinations in search of great buildings.

The show coincides with the 30th anniversary of one of his most representative works: the Church of La Luz, a small chapel in his native Osaka, famous for the way light rays pass through the cruciform opening of the concrete wall behind the altar. "To be beautiful, architecture has to frame nature and create a permeable border between inside and outside. It's hard to express it in words, but I think that's the true value of architecture," says Ando. That mixture of concrete and nature is also in the Armani Theater and in most of its buildings.

Highlighting different periods of Ando's career, the exhibition gathers the architect's major projects, which are depicted in 180 drawings, and 70 original plans and slideshows. Ando, along with his architectural practice, designed the staging of some of his major projects for the exhibition, including: the Azuma House in Sumiyoshi (1976), Naoshima (1988 to the present day), the Church of Light (1989), and the upcoming La Bourse de Commerce in Paris (fall 2019).

“Architecture also involves creating places for the community. I produce my architecture by asking myself how I can create things that remain forever imprinted on people’s souls,” Ando says in an interview with exhibition co-curator Frédéric Migayrou.
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Curators
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Exhibition curated by Frédéric Migayrou, Deputy Director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre de Création Industrielle and Yuki Yoshikawa, Associate Curator, with the Tadao Ando Exhibition Committee.
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Location
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Armani/Silos. Via Bergognone 40, Milan, Italy +39 02 91630010
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Dates
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From April 9, to July 28th, 2019
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Tadao Ando was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1941. Ando briefly worked as a professional boxer in his youth. At 17, he obtained a featherweight boxing license and participated in professional bouts in Japan. At the same time, he worked as a truck driver and carpenter, a trade in which he gained firsthand experience in constructing furniture and wooden structures.

Tadao Ando did not attend formal architecture school for economic and personal reasons. He came from a modest family in Osaka, and financial constraints prevented him from attending university. During this time, he began reading architectural books on his own, by Mies van der Rohe and other modern architects, including treatises by Le Corbusier, particularly the book Vers une architecture, which was decisive for his vocation. His alternative training consisted of reading, attending lectures, and learning from direct observation.

A self-taught architect, he spent time in Kyoto and Nara, where he studied firsthand the great monuments of traditional Japanese architecture. Between 1962 and 1969, he travelled to the United States, Europe, and Africa to learn about Western architecture, its history, and techniques. His studies of traditional and modern Japanese architecture profoundly influenced his work and resulted in a unique blend of these rich traditions.

In 1969, he founded Tadao Ando Architect and Associates in Osaka. He is an honorary member of the architecture academies in six countries; he has been a visiting professor at Yale, Columbia, and Harvard University; and in 1997, he became a professor of architecture at the University of Tokyo.

His notable works include the Water Church (1988) and the Light Church (1989) in Japan; the Naoshima Museum of Contemporary Art (1992); the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas (2002); and the UNESCO Conference Center in Paris (1995).

In 1991, he completed Rokko Housing II, the second phase of a residential complex begun in 1983 in Kobe, which was expanded in a third phase in 1998.

Ando has received numerous architectural awards, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1995. Tadao Ando was appointed to the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1995. In 1995, he was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. He was subsequently promoted to Officer in 1997 and to Commander in 2013.

In 1996, he received the Praemium Imperiale for Architecture from the Japan Art Association, and in 1997, he was awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Gold Medal, the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2002, and the Kyoto Prize for his outstanding career in the arts and philosophy in 2002.

His works have been exhibited at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA in New York, and the Venice Architecture Biennale, where he has participated in multiple editions since 1985. His buildings can be seen in Japan, Europe, the United States, and India.

In the fall of 2001, as a follow-up to the comprehensive master plan commissioned by Cooper, Robertson & Partners in the 1990s and completed in 2001, Tadao Ando was selected to develop a new architectural master plan for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, to expand its buildings and enhance its 140-acre campus. The project included the construction of the new Stone Hill Center exhibition building (2008) and the expansion of the Clark Museum, which reopened in 2014.

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Published on: July 24, 2019
Cite:
metalocus, ANDREA GONZÁLEZ
"The Challenge exhibition on Tadao Ando in Armani/Silos" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/challenge-exhibition-tadao-ando-armanisilos> ISSN 1139-6415
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