Tadao Ando's MPavilion 10 welcomes visitors to find a moment of eternity

A 14.4-metre-diameter slim aluminium-clad disc, seemingly floating slightly over several orthogonally arranged concrete walls, is a graceful canopy of just opened MPavilion 10. The room-like structure sits comfortably on a green meadow inside Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens. Designed by Japan’s most revered architect, the 82-year-old Tadao Ando, the pavilion is conceived as a new meeting point around which the annual design festival of free public programming will be taking place for the next five months. This year’s MPavilion is the tenth edition erected on this spot since 2014. The extraordinary decade-long tradition was initiated by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation. Past MPavilions were designed by such acclaimed architects as Glenn Murcutt, Carme Pinós, Rem Koolhaas, Bijoy Jain, and Amanda Levete. Sean Godsell, who was the creator of the very first pavilion, this time, played the role of the executive architect. At the end of each season, the foundation gifts its MPavilion to any institution that’s willing to install it permanently with public access anywhere in the state of Victoria.

The footprint of MPavilion 10 is defined by two offset rectangles—one paved in bluestone, the other turned into a reflecting pool—each outlined by concrete walls, as high as a slightly taller-than-average height person could reach with a stretched hand. The umbrella-like canopy is carried by the centrally situated cylindrical column; its hollow interior behind a curved door houses electrical equipment. The pavilion, a tranquil sanctuary reminiscent of a traditional Japanese walled garden, is accessed through unenclosed ends at two opposite corners. Two of the walls—one facing north, the other south—feature improbably long, nearly 20 metres each, slender cutouts at eye level. They appropriately frame uninterrupted views of the park to the south and the skyline of downtown Melbourne to the north.

The MPavilion 10 is Ando’s first built work in Australia. The self-taught architect is the winner of the 1995 Pritzker Prize; he was a visiting professor at Harvard and is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Tokyo. Ando’s most representative works—the Church of the Light, Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, and Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris—incorporate mastery of concrete, sunlight, and water; the use of rigorous primary geometry; and strategic insertion of slender slots into solid walls. All of these meticulously cultivated and beautifully fine-tuned ingredients are now on display in Melbourne. As part of the MPavilion 10 program, a competition was held to design site-specific chairs. Out of almost 100 submissions, Ando selected the winning design of the Melbourne-based Davidov Architects. Their especially commissioned Circle|Square timber chairs will be an integral part of this season’s events. In the following interview, Tadao Ando discussed some of the intentions behind his pavilion design, the need to look at the very roots of things, the eternal qualities of space, and relying on universal materials to create something unique to the place.    

Vladimir Belogolovsky (VB): Made of concrete, steel, aluminium, bluestone, and water, your MPavilion employs the geometry of a circle within a square. What are some of the reasons for these choices and what do you hope visitors will take away from coming in touch with your creation?

Tadao Ando: (TA) The design for the MPavilion began with a basic desire to find a moment of eternity within Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens. I imagined an architecture of emptiness, a sort of blank canvas. I relied on pure geometry to outline a composition to express the pursuit of ethereal space. The circle and square give form to emptiness. Natural light and wind enter and breathe life into this space, a place for a dialogue between individuals. The circle represents our planet and harmony.    

VB: Why did you decide to use concrete as your primary material?

TA: I wanted to create a space with a very common material that anyone is familiar with. 

VB: Japanese architecture is traditionally based on the use of wood. Yet, you typically work with concrete. Why is that?

TA: Concrete is the material of the modernist epoch and has pervaded throughout the 20^th century. Major cities in Japan saw explosive economic development and reconstruction after the war. Cities such as Tokyo and Osaka grew into massive concrete jungles. I strive to create unique work despite concrete’s ubiquity as a testament to the possibility of this material. It is, of course, a challenge to make the city we live in a better place by only using the material that defines it.

VB: Is there consistency in your concrete walls or do you try to achieve different qualities of surface and light every time?

TA: I like the handmade quality of concrete and its subtle variation of colour and texture. Concrete has a tactile beauty that provides the perfect backdrop for our imagination. The construction method for my concrete is consistent, yet its expression reflects the place it is built in. The aggregate used in the concrete mix, the air absorbed from the sky, and the light cast on its surface, are always unique to each place.

VB: You have said that architecture is about the process, not the final building. What was the design process like for the MPavilion?

TA: MPavilion is one of the smallest and fastest-moving projects among my recent works. Thus, once we proposed our design, we were able to focus on the development of subtle details and material quality. Sean Godsell, the executive architect, was invaluable in communicating my vision. He enabled us to execute carefully considered details and excellent craftmanship in Australia where we haven’t worked before.

VB: When you describe your work, you use such words and phrases as delight, silence, uncertainty, sensitivity, from emptiness to infinity, new thinking, living with nature, increasingly interesting spaces, a form of joy, a search for geometry, a blank canvas, treat water like a living thing, and treat light like a living thing. How else would you describe the kind of architecture that you try to achieve?

TA: The essential value of architecture must stay unchanged, to create a habitat for the human spirit, to hold memory and history, and to foster culture through the urban landscape. It is precisely because the future is uncertain that we need to look at the very roots of creation, its eternal origins.

VB: And finally, could you elaborate on your phrase, “I want to create spaces that no one else in the world can create.”

TA: Going back to your earlier question about material choices, I limit the primary materials of my buildings to glass, steel, and concrete because they are materials that defined the Industrial Revolution and are available everywhere in the world. Working within a limited palette is certainly a challenge, but once overcome it gives life to the most profound spaces one can imagine. Each place requires a unique form of architecture, a specific response to its distinct context. My philosophy is to use material that is universally available to create something unique to the place.