Tadao Ando At Naoshima

Sited on an elevated cape at the southern end of this largely unspoiled island in the Inland Sea of Japan, the Naoshima Island Art Complex represents Ando at his most stunning. At turns rational and unpredictable, his projects, such as the Chichu Arat Museum featured here, embody spaces that encourage contemplation and demonstrate a love for essential forms. His use of ordinary and standard building materials – wood, glass, concrete, steel – is highly idiosyncratic, frequently surprising, and reveals an affinity for the natural world as coupled with a reverence for that which is personal and very human. Among the handful of great, living,world-class architects,Tadao Ando is particularly noted for work that elegantly combines the sensual and ethereal, the pragmatic and poetic. This is simply a must have title for those who would understand this seminal figure at work now in contemporary world architecture.