A photograph of the Garden of Fine Arts in Kyoto, Japan, puts Tadao Ando’s modernism through a postmodern lens
Greg Holmes turned to architectural photography only once he had completed an English Literature degree at Manchester University. He feels that its 19th-century neogothic campus osmotically got under his skin in the years he studied there; but also, with his love of 60s and 70s music, its Brutalist faculty buildings too. He puts it down to mere nostalgia but I wonder if Jane Austen, Horace Walpole or Charles Dickens’ evocations of buildings, so embedded in their fiction, might not have subliminally heightened his own imagination in the real world. He’s not sure, but wistfully concedes that Bram Stoker’s Dracula – arguably the world’s first postmodern novel – still drives an unrealised desire to visit Whitby.
This image is one taken on a more exotic trip – to Japan and the Garden of Fine Arts in Kyoto. Perhaps fuelled by his love of Manchester modernism, Holmes is a fan of Tadao Ando. This 1994 design, an open-air gallery, encapsulates Ando’s characteristic silken concrete and glass, creating the subtle interplay of light and shadow for which he is famous. The experience, Holmes adds, is nuanced by an innocuous entrance leading visitors down into a canyon of ramps, waterfalls and pools, past life-sized reproductions, printed on ceramic tile, of works by the likes of da Vinci, Michelangelo and van Gogh.
There’s an irony to the place that’s summed-up in this shot: observers observed looking at Seurat’s historic painting about watching. Softening its severity, Ando’s modernism is suddenly seen through an unintended, postmodern lens.