The Kolonihaven exhibition crates from the Louisiana Museum have arrived in Japan and a Glass Teahouse by Tadao Ando is being added to the collection of tiny pavilions by world renown architects. The pavilions are currently under construction at the museum north of Copenhagen.
Tadao Ando
Glass Teahouse
Images courtesy Tadao Ando
Inspired by Kamono Chomei (1155-1216), who wrote the manuscript HOJOKI in his exile for solitude, I envisioned a Glass Teahouse.
In HOJOKI, Kamono Chomei took along his hermitage, a tiny 3x3 meter space, where he wrote and slept and thought about the ever-changing world, contemplating nothingness as well as infinity.
This Teahouse represents a portion of a cone-shaped spiral, signifying a continuous link from zero to infinity. Corresponding to human scale, a 2.4 meter cubic space is taken from this continuous spiral and symbolzed in the transparent glass box. When one enters into the spiral, the mind could depart from everyday life and travel from a tiny condensed DNA cell through to an infinite Milky Way. Through a simple construction, I hope the Teahouse space as a contemporary hermitage or a mind spaceship could entertain visitors by encouraging their mind into realm of unlimited imagination.
Tadao Ando
Images courtesy Tadao Ando
A much larger project by Tadao Ando in currently under construction on Naoshima Island. The new museum building, scheduled to open in 2005, is part of the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum & Annex complex; also designed by Ando. Situated across the cove the new building will contain a Monet water lily painting and large installations by James Turrell and De Maria.
Photo: arcspace
The Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum & Annex
Photo: arcspace
The construction site across the cove
More about Tadao Ando's Glass Teahouse and the Kolonihaven exhibition at Tokyo Big Sight with our next update on October 16th.; two days late because of data base adjustments.
P.S. Later this month we will have a feature, with a zip folder for members, about the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum and Annex; the first of several projects in Japan by Tadao Ando.
October 7, 2002
