Tadao Ando’s raw passion in 750 artworks

For Tadao Ando, the self-taught architect maverick, drawing is thinking. Known for austere yet elegant concrete buildings with knife-sharp edges, Ando brings his ideas to life with just a few freehand pencil lines and an energetically scribbled tornado of a single pastel color.

Glimpses of this wild artistic sensibility appear throughout monographs on Ando’s work, and his hand-drawings have been shown in exhibitions before — most recently this summer in “Youth” in his hometown of Osaka, and earlier in the sweeping "Tadao Ando: Endeavors" at the National Art Center, Tokyo, in 2017. “Tadao Ando. Sketches, Drawings & Architecture,” published by Taschen last month, flips the script. It focuses solely on his rough architectural sketches, drawings, and a few plans and photos. It’s an unconventional monograph of architecture in that it highlights the process and ideas instead of polished results, while also celebrating the now-declining craft of hand-drawn architectural illustration.

“For me ... exquisite computer-graphic expressions do not have sufficient strength to become the genesis of a new era,” Ando, 84, writes in the book’s foreword. “Instead, I am more attracted to the cobbled-together study models and rough line sketches that are generated in the process of struggling to arrive at these shapes.”