An Investigation on Tadao Ando s Phenomenological Reflections

Although tadao ando never refers to phenomenology explicitly, concentrating on hisnumerous texts and writings reveals that his way of thinking on architecture implies some essential themesand concerns, which are fundamentally related to the “phenomenological discourse” in both philosophyand 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 reflectionon 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 hiswritings and words through which his central phenomenological concerns and their similarities anddifferences 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 existingphenomenological reflections in ando’s architectural thought and work are not the result of his systematicinvestigation and reading of theoretical texts about the philosophy of phenomenology, but rather they aremore rooted in his personal state of mind, his way of learning and understanding architecture, his culturalbackground and attention to the eastern-japanese way of thinking, and to some extent studying the worksof some architectural theoreticians like norberg-schulz and frampton.