Last week my partner and I walked along a Chicago residential street to Wrightwood 659, a brand new exhibition space designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando.
The Antithesis
The previous day, a wonderful volunteer docent, an elderly woman, went silent when I said that Ando walks on water. Maybe I had offended her religious sensibilities, but more likely I had contradicted her aesthetic values. Certainly, my words were too hyperbolic.
She had been showing us some of Chicago’s lovely Art Deco commercial buildings. She spoke from the heart as she drew our attention to ornate and fantastical details.
At the end, we walked back together to the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s spiffy new digs. She asked about our plans for the remainder of our time in Chicago. I mentioned we would be visiting Wrightwood 659 next day, and she said she had been there.
When she fell silent after my Ando-walking-on-water comment, I quickly changed the subject. Religious or aesthetic values can stir controversy, and this was a time for polite conversation.
Brutalist is often thrown at concrete structures; it’s rarely meant to be complimentary. The term originates in the French, brut, which means unadorned. In the 1920’s, Le Corbusier’s unadorned concrete designs represented a path that was quite different from the Art Deco movement that was also taking off at the time.
Of course, both worldviews can and do coexist. Both can be pleasing. Done badly, as in some postmodern buildings, adornments on a box only accentuate the lack of acumen in the design. If you tack a fake gable onto a Walmart, it’s still a disposable industrial structure.
Tadao Ando’s Early Influences
Tadao Ando’s early influences included Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Ando did not have a formal architecture education; instead, in the 1960’s, he started reading widely, and traveled the world to experience great architecture. He traced Le Corbusier’s plans over and over until they became grey with graphite dust. Not bad for someone who started his working life as a boxer.
Self-taught, he has won the major international architecture awards, including the ultimate award for architects, the Pritzker. He’s lectured at Harvard, Columbia, and Yale where the students can only dream of such success.
In the 1960’s, his formative years, Ando traveled overseas to experience the masters at first hand. The only examples of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright’s and Le Corbusier in Japan were Wright’s Imperial Hotel and Le Corbusier’s National Museum of Western Art: he had to travel.
Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright in Japan
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel (Tokyo, built 1923) was torn down in 1968, but I viewed a reconstruction of the lobby at an architectural museum, Museum Meiji Mura, about an hour out of Nagoya by train then bus.
Le Corbusier’s National Museum of Western Art (Tokyo, built 1959) is much easier to view, provided you don’t visit on a Monday when it’s closed. It’s conveniently located in Ueno Park, right next to the Ueno mainline train station.
Of course, I visited on a Monday, so I only got to peer from afar at the only Le Corbusier building in East Asia.
A Residential Street in Chicago
Last week we looked across a residential street in Chicago at the brick-faced Wrightwood 659.
From the outside, Wrightwood 659 looks like a traditional apartment building. However, the concrete floating roof suggests this building has gone through a metamorphosis.
Unlike Wrightwood 659 the building to the right (665 West Wrightwood Avenue) with a concrete wall and a large door looks thoroughly Ando. This is the 1998 Eychaner/Lee House.
The Eychaner/Lee House
The Eychaner/Lee House reminded me of one Ando’s early projects: the more modest 1976 Row House in Sumiyoshi (Azuma House) in Osaka, Japan.
The Azuma House occupies a gap in a row of old houses, but unlike its neighbors, it has no windows on the wall adjacent to the street. It’s divided into three spaces from front to back: a two-level interior space, a courtyard, and another two-level interior space. To get between the interior spaces, you walk across the courtyard, This coexistence with nature, and the use of light (in this case from above) are key Ando elements.
I would observe later that the Eychaner/Lee House, like the Azuma House, is divided into front and rear interior spaces connected by a courtyard. However, the courtyard sits on an interior space that connects the front and rear. Unlike the Azuma House, Eychaner and Lee can opt to be protected from the elements as they move from the front to the back of their home.
Wrightwood 659
The project’s cost is not being disclosed, but it gives every sign of being the kind of spare-no-expense undertaking that make the rich different from you and me. The client is Fred Eychaner, the Chicago communications mogul whose reclusive nature has found perfect expression in Ando’s inward-turning buildings.
Chicago Tribune, October 18, 2018
Not coincidentally, Wrightwood 659 stands next to 665 W. Wrightwood Ave., an unrelentingly private, Ando house for Eychaner that was completed in 1998. Ando’s first American building, it followed an Ando gallery for Japanese screens at the Art Institute of Chicago that opened in 1992 and became a favored site for meditation after the convulsions of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
We crossed the street and entered Wrightwood 659.
Instructions were clear. The Wrightwood does not accept walk-ins, so we had reserved a three-hour time slot. Our little daypack, containing what we needed for an overnight in Chicago, met size restrictions, but, as expected, had to be checked before we started exploring. Photography was permitted, but I had decided only to take occasional, quick snapshots with my phone. I wanted to experience this place in the moment.
And there was one more requirement. The person greeting us asked us not to touch the concrete. This would have been one of my first acts (see my previous post, Finding Tadao Ando), but I mercifully learned of the restriction before I disgraced myself.
A calmness came over me in this beautiful space. For a short time, the vagaries of the outside world ceased to exist.
The Exhibition
The inaugural exhibition at the Wrightwood nicely draws connections between Ando and Le Corbusier. I’m presuming the above photo of Ando was taken some time in the 1990’s when he had a dog he’d named Le Corbusier.
The first gallery presented some of Le Corbusier’s architectural drawings, notes and artwork. I learned about his five points of architecture: replacement of supporting walls with concrete pillars, open floor plans, facades set free from structural constraints, ribbon windows, and roof gardens.
The final Le Corbusier gallery showed dozens of models of buildings he had designed, in chronological order. The models had been built by Ando’s students.
I followed the progression, starting with traditional-looking buildings before World War I. Immediately after the war, Le Corbusier’s style becomes clear.
As I walked slowly around the display, I could see the emergence of elements like ribbon windows. And there were so many ramps, another Le Corbusier hallmark.
After learning about Le Corbusier we headed upstairs to the Ando section of the exhibition.
The first gallery was filled with a scale model of much of the island of Naoshima, Japan, where Ando has several buildings.
I’ve written previously about my visit to Naoshima (see Finding Tadao Ando and Glass Houses and Buried Museums). I walked around this model spotting buildings I’ve visited.
Another gallery featured a scale model of Church of the Light in Ibaraki, near Osaka, Japan.
I tried to visit this place in October, but access is restricted, and a visit has to be reserved many months ahead.
Another gallery featured some of Ando’s other works, including The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, and the Pulitzer Art Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri. Ando had annotated some of the exhibits using a Sharpie.
By now we were on the top (4th) floor under the floating concrete roof we had noticed before entering the building. We walked into a long hallway, concrete wall on one side, floor-to-ceiling windows on the other. We looked down at the Eychaner/Lee House next door, and downtown Chicago in the distance.
It was time to leave this beautiful place, and reenter the outside world.
I visited Wrightwood659 a couple weeks ago and was also surprised at the instruction to “not touch the walls.” I did anyway (gently) because concrete with THAT finish must be experienced tactilely.
Aside from the views, (the house roof) the top level walkway was disappointing. Any space with Ando’s name deserves much more of a ceiling than an open structure with exposed mechanical systems painted black. The exterior detailing of that level was exquisite however. The glass guard simply standing between pieces of stone paving was brilliant !
Eric: Thanks for note. I must confess I also (gently) touched the concrete, as I have with other Ando structures. The surface is exquisite, and I’m still in awe of the way the concrete comes out the mold that way.
Yes, I get your point about the ceiling–that is certainly sub-standard for Ando. By the time I reached that floor, I was incapable of criticism.
I loved all the tiny finish details like the triple-glazed windows, open doors and outlets flush with walls, the color-adjusted lights on the exterior wall to shine through the slit windows to enhance daylight. On and on.
Here’s to beautiful architecture!
It’s nice to get your return note Tom. You mentioned the most amazing detail I noticed which is the very narrow and even space between the electrical outlet cover plates and the concrete edge where outlets were located in concrete. Unfortunately, being an Architectural professional, I am able to critique architecture at any time, no matter how much of it I’ve seen. It’s a bit of a curse.
I looked through your blog and found that I was at Wrightwood 659 the day before you. It looks like you have also visited some fantastic places in Minneapolis. The Sculpture garden at The Walker is my favorite of any garden I’ve visited, but I’ve done very little travelling outside the US.