Walls of Light

Famed architect TADAO ANDO makes sure there’s something to see at the new Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth—the building itself.

WHEN THE DIRECTORS OF THE MODERN ART Museum of Fort
Worth announced that Tadao Ando would design their new headquarters,
skeptics wondered
if the renowned architect would be able to rise to the challenge. The
building’s scale (eventually 150,000 square feet) lay beyond Ando’s
usual métier. He doesn’t speak English and once wondered if he
would be able to work at all outside his native Japan. Plus, there was
the problem of the weather.

The museum’s director, Marla Price, and curator,
Michael Auping, even made a special trip to Osaka to speak to Ando
about the climate in Fort Worth. “I began by explaining that it is
often exceedingly hot in the summer,” Price remembers of her 1997 visit
to Ando’s Spartan studio. “I also told him that the temperature can
suddenly drop by as much as 50 degrees in an hour and that there are
hailstorms with hail the size of a baseball.” The hail stumped both the
translator and Ando, who looked at Price in disbelief. “After some
fumbling around, I finally came up with ice balls falling from the
sky,” Price says. “But I could tell that they didn’t really believe
me.” When Ando arrived in Fort Worth later that year to present
completed plans to the board of the museum, a terrific hailstorm
descended from the north. Price says that the first thing Ando said
when the two met was, “I see you arranged a hailstorm for my benefit.”

In his plans for the museum, Ando built deep
overhangs to protect the soaring 40-foot-high, south-facing,
glass-walled lobby from the sun and hail. And by designing a poetic
structure that is both Eastern and Western, ancient and modern, Ando
has done much more than protect his reputation as a premier
architect—he’s enshrined it. A memory of the whole history of
architecture is right here in this place, from the 1,000-year-old straw
and wood temples of Kyoto to the steel- and glass-walled modernist
skyscrapers of 20th-century New York City, engaged in an oasis of
natural sensations by a restless mind that has taken the harsh climate
of North Texas and turned it into a willing, pliant consort. In short,
Ando built a museum that fits perfectly in Fort Worth’s landscape and
enlarges Fort Worth’s position as a destination in world architecture.

THOSE WHO HAVE FOLLOWED ANDO’S CAREER are
familiar with his talent. Although self-taught, he is the only living
architect to have received all of the major awards given to architects
(including, this year, the esteemed Kyoto Prize). Still, at the time it
was commissioned, the Modern in Fort Worth was to be his first major
project outside of Japan, where he enjoys the cult status of a rock
star. He looks the part, too. At 61, Ando still wears his thick, dark
hair in bangs, as he did when he was a young, amateur boxer. In
architectural circles, Ando is known for his lyrical writings on the
role of nature and for compact, severe concrete boxes that are
illuminated with piercing rays of northern Japanese light. “I don’t
believe architecture should speak too much,” Ando says via e-mail. “I
believe it should remain silent and let nature, in the guise of
sunlight and wind, speak through it.”

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth does just that.
Across a 65-foot expanse with the stately elegance of the Egyptian
temple at Karnac, a one-and-a-half-acre, slate-blue reflecting pool
bounces shimmering waves of natural light into the galleries. In the
distance, the gardens are contained within massive walls of polished
gray concrete that seem to recede into the horizon.

Now that the building has been completed, Ando
admits there were “various struggles and conflicts” with the
contractors, but what great building goes up without tension? In fact,
tension seems to be the guiding force behind the building, which is
supported by the massive weight of the thick, polished concrete
walls—Ando’s trademark. In Ando’s hands, concrete becomes a whole other
material, formed in carefully made wooden casts with local river rocks,
buffed to a high-gloss shine, edges smoothed to a knifepoint.

“It seems to me, at present, concrete is the most
suitable material for realizing spaces created by rays of sunlight,” he
says. “When they agree with my aesthetic image, walls become abstract,
are negated, and approach the ultimate limit of space.”

While concrete walls often agree with Ando’s
aesthetic image, visitors might not initially find them as appealing.
In fact, it is often difficult to convince people of his architectural
importance based solely on exterior photographs of his stolid concrete
boxes, which often resemble power plants. People approaching the new
museum from downtown Fort Worth will be underwhelmed by the outward
appearance of the long, uninterrupted stretches of aluminum, glass, and
concrete on the outside of the building. As the museum’s own director
puts it: “Ando does not put his best face to the street.”

Ando rewards persistence in the interior with a
series of delicately calibrated spaces that recede from the central
lobby up and down three stairways of varying sizes, through channels
that wrap around to the reflecting pool and lead to unexpected small
spaces. “Enclosed in small spaces, people can allow their thoughts to
range into infinity,” says Ando, who is at his best in intimate spaces.
Ando’s painstaking attention to detail—he insists that the gaps between
walls be one-eighth of an inch instead of the standard inch or so—has
the cumulative effect of raising expectations of purity. Unfortunately,
this refinement makes the few missteps all the more glaring—especially
the boxy, standard-issue gallery rooms on the lower level that are
composed of plain, white drywall with plywood backing. It’s as if
another architect suddenly took charge of the project.

The overall effect of the building, though, is all
very dreamy and poetic in a clearly Eastern way, without being the
slightest bit precious. There is no raked sand, no wind chimes or paper
walls, no hint of the cloying Pan Asian sensibility you might expect in
a place with this range of ecclesiastical special effects. Ando is one
of the leaders of a small group of architects who have been gathered
together as purveyors of sacred spaces for temporal uses.

Probably not surprising given his boxer’s
background, Ando’s work has something resolutely tough about it. He has
taken what he describes as the “feeling for traditional Japanese space”
and breathed it into a range of uncompromising modernist forms selected
from a group of mid-century Western standards. Ando is the mannered
favorite student referring to his betters as if he were coming out of a
dream.

IN MANY WAYS, ANDO’S LIFE BEGAN AS A BAD dream. Born
in Osaka, the second largest city in Japan, in 1941, he was 4 years old
when Allied bombers decimated his hometown. “The cheap sprawl of modern
Japan reduced to a mere dream, the liberation of space by modern
architecture,” Ando later wrote of his childhood in the elevated,
crowded, industrial city. He broke away from his middle-class family by
adopting the lower-class patois of the streets of Osaka and becoming a
boxer, meanwhile indulging his sensitive, poetic side by venturing out
into the country to study old, rural farmhouses.

Ando appreciated—and continues to
appreciate—handiwork. He learned woodworking from craftsmen and pursued
an interest in architecture that was based on a passion for the slow,
measured, razor-sharp Japan of Samurais. Unhappy with examples of
modern architecture found at home, he toured modern architecture around
the world, stopping in France to see concrete and glass chapels by Le
Corbusier. In New York City, he saw the effect of a reflecting pool on
a glass-walled skyscraper by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He also visited
Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Museum of Art, just across the street from the new
Modern Art Museum. The Kimbell opened in 1972, three years after Ando
started his architectural practice in Osaka.

A primary reason the directors selected Ando’s
design in 1997 was the ingenious way it referred to the Kimbell without
attempting to be imitative or overshadowing. Often cited as the most
important small museum design in the United States, the Kimbell is
admittedly a major influence on Ando, who admires the “order, light,
and silence,” of the vaulted galleries. Together, the two buildings
have already become an architectural pas de deux.

Building an architectural attraction was a goal of
the directors, who wanted their new building to be a drawing card that
makes up for the institution’s admitted curatorial deficiencies.
Because of the way the museum was structured in its early days, it was
unable to collect art as ambitiously as its competitors. Even the
largest checkbook cannot make up for those shortcomings today.

Ever since the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao in Spain opened in 1997, attracting more than a million
tourists in the first year, museum architecture has become a selling
point for ambitious municipalities. The added revenues from upscale
visitors and the lure of highly trained workers who want intellectual
stimulus from their communities surely helped loosen some of the purse
strings that contributed to the $65 million building fund for Fort
Worth’s Modern.

Ando and Gehry may share a broad ambition to lure
tourists and art lovers alike (Ando maintains that he set out to
produce a space in Fort Worth that would be primarily comfortable for
children and artists), but their designs are vastly different. Ando,
with his delicate, tough, involute sense of space is perhaps the
antithesis of Gehry’s voluminous, crowd-pleasing titanium megaliths. In
fact, the producers of a documentary about the construction of the new
Modern asked Gehry to comment on Ando’s work. Gehry agreed but added,
good-naturedly, that he didn’t know why they would ask him since his
work and Ando’s couldn’t be more different.

If anything, Ando is the anti-Gehry. The Japanese
architect has a quiet sensibility that grows with multiple visits;
different times of the day yield radically different environments.
Under a hot sun or under the threat of a hailstorm, Ando’s work
represents that of a modernist in touch with the traditional past, an
architect who lets climate seep through his finely crafted building
like an unearthly presence.

“What we got from modern architecture was a sense
that people were overwhelmed by vast spaces,” Ando says. “One must
envelop them instead in a gentle environment.” Odd words to come from a
pugilist. But the architect has delivered.

New York-based writer Jeffrey Hogrefe is the author of O’Keeffe: The Life of an American Legend. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth opens December 14

PHOTOGRAPHY BY NAN COULTER AND DAVID WOO