Awaji Yumebutai
Awaji Yumebutai Park, Botanical Gardens, Cultural Complex, Hotel and Conference Center, Awaji Island, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan.
Open Air Theatre
Architect: Tadao Ando, 2000
The Awaji Yumebutai complex deserves a few accompanying words, as I found it both highly fascinating (and photogenic), yet at the same time profoundly strange. The development originated in the massive excavation pit left behind from the construction of several artificial islands in the Osaka Bay, including Kansai Airport. The resulting scar in the Awaji hills (which incidentally became the epicentre of the deadly Hanshin Kobe earthquake in 1995) was to be replaced foremost by “new nature”, with the assignment given to architect Tadao Ando, who designed every part of the complex (including some major amendments after the earthquake).
The result is unlike any modern architecture I have seen – a fully abstracted, totally artificial representation of nature, but almost entirely devoid of the real thing. Instead, the vision realized in Yumebutai is best described as a mash-up of the Acropolis, the Alhambra, the Forum Romanum and similar monumental and hyper-geometric sites, combined with elements of cascaded renaissance water gardens such as the Villa d’Este. Nature itself is mostly present in name, such as “Sky Garden” or “Water Garden”, both made entirely of Ando’s signature tie-holed concrete, or “Shell Beach” for the tens of thousands of meticulously arranged and inlaid seashells that line the concrete bottoms of pools and cascades.
But most strange of all is the feeling that all this only exists for architecture’s sake – while the site contains several large functions such as a conference centre, grand hotel, wedding chapel and cultural and gastronomy spaces, all of these don’t even make up 50% of the constructed area, and it seems that first and foremost the expansive concrete structures that fill the hillsides are there because of Ando’s vision, rather than for any functional needs – a quite unique and at the same time unsettling perspective.
Awaji Yumebutai
Awaji Yumebutai Park, Botanical Gardens, Cultural Complex, Hotel and Conference Center, Awaji Island, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan.
Open Air Theatre
Architect: Tadao Ando, 2000
The Awaji Yumebutai complex deserves a few accompanying words, as I found it both highly fascinating (and photogenic), yet at the same time profoundly strange. The development originated in the massive excavation pit left behind from the construction of several artificial islands in the Osaka Bay, including Kansai Airport. The resulting scar in the Awaji hills (which incidentally became the epicentre of the deadly Hanshin Kobe earthquake in 1995) was to be replaced foremost by “new nature”, with the assignment given to architect Tadao Ando, who designed every part of the complex (including some major amendments after the earthquake).
The result is unlike any modern architecture I have seen – a fully abstracted, totally artificial representation of nature, but almost entirely devoid of the real thing. Instead, the vision realized in Yumebutai is best described as a mash-up of the Acropolis, the Alhambra, the Forum Romanum and similar monumental and hyper-geometric sites, combined with elements of cascaded renaissance water gardens such as the Villa d’Este. Nature itself is mostly present in name, such as “Sky Garden” or “Water Garden”, both made entirely of Ando’s signature tie-holed concrete, or “Shell Beach” for the tens of thousands of meticulously arranged and inlaid seashells that line the concrete bottoms of pools and cascades.
But most strange of all is the feeling that all this only exists for architecture’s sake – while the site contains several large functions such as a conference centre, grand hotel, wedding chapel and cultural and gastronomy spaces, all of these don’t even make up 50% of the constructed area, and it seems that first and foremost the expansive concrete structures that fill the hillsides are there because of Ando’s vision, rather than for any functional needs – a quite unique and at the same time unsettling perspective.