ARCHITECT OF THE “PLACE”: TADAO ANDO

Regionalism in architectural practices is a trend in which place-specific parameters such as culture, tradition, climate, topography, local materials and techniques are of absolute importance. In place-specific architectural productions, the physical and sociocultural components of the place and context to which they belong are the most basic data. Following the Industrial Revolution and World War II, rapid processes of production and consumption observed on a global scale led to ruptures from place and the emergence of problems of placelessness. The counter-attitude exhibited by postmodernism, which emerged against the placelessness of modernism, could not establish healthy relationships with place either. With the Critical Regionalism that emerged following these processes, the importance of ”place" was emphasized, and with various manifestos and principles, it was argued that place is a set of values that have absolute importance in architectural design processes. This study aims to analyze the relationship between Tadao Ando, one of the recent hit architects, and the place and local in the context of Critical Regionalism. The study aims to find out which site-specific design criteria are at the forefront in Tadao Ando's architectural works. Yıldız Kuyrukçu (2018) determined the universal design criteria for calling an architectural product ‘critical regionalist-belonging to that place (region)’ by determining the keywords from the articles titled ‘Ten Points on Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic’ that Frampton put forward in 1987. In this study, within the framework of the place-specific design criteria developed by Yıldız Kuyrukçu in 2018, the relationship of the selected 10 hit architectural works of Ando with the place was analyzed.