The sublime and the Azuma House by Tadao Ando

Abstract

This paper investigates the sublime as manifested in the architecture of Tadao Ando. The primary object of interpretation is his Azuma House (1976) in Osaka. However, according to Ando, the sublime equally characterises his religious work such as the Church of the Light (1989) near Osaka. One unique characteristic of Ando's architecture is the treatment of residential and religious buildings according to common spatial themes, challenging the conventional dichotomy between the profane and the sacred. The evocation of the sublime can be claimed as one such theme. Both buildings are particularisations of the theme of the sublime: in the case of the Azuma House into the context of the everyday and, in the case of the Church of the Light, into the context of the theological horizon of Christianity. This paper elucidates how the spatial setting of the Azuma residence conditions, in a distinguishing manner, the experience of the sublime. Given that, in the history of Western architecture, Etienne-Louis Boullée's architecture of immense emptiness (as manifested in the Metropolitan Basilica and Newton's Cenotaph) presents itself as one of the most distinctive articulations of the sublime, it is employed here as the dialogic partner for Ando's architecture of the sublime.