"When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this is very unique to Japan. Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture."

Other influential works

Art Museum

Church of Light

Roof Construction
The shape of the roof is like a large open umbrella. It is made of the same scaffolding as the main structure, covered by a red fabric skin. Tadao Ando states that the theatre without this roof would be its ideal form, but of course thats not possible because of the weather. At the end of some performances the tent is peeled back. Each of the three pieces of fabric can be pulled back by ropes, if its appropriate for the performance the roof can open up.


The material of the outer skin is a plywood panel, the panels are painted black. Old Japanese fences are often oil stained black like this. Spaces left between each panel allow light to filter through. During the day, natural light filters in through these slits. At night, the red glow of the interior is visible from outside. The overall colours are red and black, red is the colour used for celebratory occasions in Japan.


Light
An entrance lobby is usually very bright, but the lobby is kept very dark. You come into the lobby and it is pitch black. In the house of the theatre, light filters up from underneath the seating.

The dodecagon is composed of a layered column structure that forms two concentric rings around the central space. The inner ring, covered by its own roof is integrated with the central space by the extension of the arc of the seating. The unroofed outer ring serves as a passageway for the actors. If it rains the play is still performed. When the actors finish and exit through this passage, the audience cannot see them only hear their voices. 


How Buddhist monks read prayers at temples, it sounds better when you hear it from outside the building, Its better just to hear the sound without watching the prayers. (Tadao Ando comments on the noise within the theatre space).


Seating
These seats are located in between pipes so people can sit within the structure. The structural system of the building and the seating don't align perfectly. The concept it to contain something that is not perfect in a perfect world.


A theatre should be a place where audience and actors get emotionally involved through the many possibilities that are generated, actors can appear on stage from different directions, the audience can physically surround actors and vice versa. As in the hana-michi of traditional kabuki, actors sometimes emerge from the back of the theatre and run through the audience to the stage.

Backstage
The backstage is all underneath, so there are always actors beneath the audience. There is one large room that serves for both dressing and set storage. Some sheets of plywood flooring were left unattached so that actors could raise them to come out. Many interesting unexpected openings are prepared on stage so that actors can come out from here and there.


Formally, this theatre is quite different from Japanese traditional theatre. Hearing voices from underneath or elsewhere without seeing them makes the audience feel that they are surrounded by the actors world. In Europe, a piazza could become a theatre and in Japan, a small side street or temple courtyard could do the same. This small and simple form of theatre eventually became large enough to be our modern theatre. So in principle, we should assume that stages exist everywhere in a city. What Tadao Ando has done here is to cover one part of the city with a roof.

Threshold into the Theatre
The approach to Karaza is by a taiko-bashi (a half drum shaped bridge) symbolizing ones departure from the world of reality. People crossing the bridge become conscious of entering an extraordinary fictional place. The bridge functions as a threshold, in a Japanese house you have a shiki (threshold) at the entrance to signify a separation of worlds. Without this, you would walk into a different world, but one which has not been distinguished from regular public space.

This theatre has a relationship to Japanese tradition and culture, in a way that is a playhouse. It gives a formal impression of something original or new, seen from both inside and outside because it is formally and conceptually unusual.


Portable Architecture - Construction / build up
Because the theatre was to be moveable, the main structure is an assemblage of pipes used in scaffolding, scaffolding is very functional. The shape of its individual members is dictated by its functionality and efficiency, anyone can put it together. The members are pipes 48.6mm in diameter and 2mm thick. The longest are 9 meters long. Twenty-five thousand ready-made clamps are used, the members are held together solely by frictional force.


The pipes can be assembled in fifteen days. Moreover, there is no need to transport building materials, with the exception of certain special parts. Practically everything is available locally. If one has the drawings and instructions the building can be easily put together anywhere. By reducing architecture to information, it is possible to transmit a building anywhere in the world.

The formal arrangement of the theatre, especially the relationship between the stage and the seating area, comes from the Greek outdoor theatre. The form of the theatre is a dodecagon ( polygon with 12 sides and 12 angles). It is structurally independent of the bridge which pierces the dodecagon volume. Ando thinks that a dodecagon represents the world. In Japan, there are twelve animals corresponding to the twelve year cycle of the calendar. In the West there are twelve months to a year and so forth.

Tadao Ando : Karaza Theatre (Japan)

Tadao Ando works primarily in exposed cast-in-place concrete and is renowned for an exemplary craftsmanship which invokes a Japanese sense of materiality, junction and spatial narrative through the pared aesthetics if international modernism. Characteristics of his work include large expanses of unadorned architectural concrete walls combined with wooden or stone floors and large windows. Active natural elements, like sun, rain, and wind are a distinctive inclusion to his style.






Ideas on Theatre - Traditional and Modern
Basically, architects as creators have to get excited about going to see their completed buildings. You really cannot lose that spirit. You know how children make toys? When they are making a toy they don't know what it will look like. But when it is built they get very excited.


In a modern theatre you never know what the actors condition and feelings are because there are too many layers of manipulation between the actor and audience. Acting becomes interesting when we, as an audience, can feel the  actors themselves. The ideal size of a theatre is one in which the audience can see with their natural vision, hear with their own ears and feel with their own senses. Ando believes that there exists an ideal size for a theatre where the actors and the audience can still communicate without technological manipulation. 


In principle, whatever the environmental conditions are, we should be able to control our lives with our own bodies and minds. This is where Tadao Ando started to conceive this project.


Since we live in a society that relies on mass communication, theaters must be able to house as large an audience as possible. Ando wanted to question what theatre is really about. Not saying that all theaters should be designed this way this is Ando's response to modern theatre in general. The feeling of what theatre might have originally been or meant motivated Ando to design this theatre.


Karaza Theatre
The use of scaffolding as a simple assembly procedure was used most notably by Tadao Ando, throughout the design of the Karaza Theatre, which was built in 15 days in 1987. Ando designed the theatre to be portable, with a vast majority of its structural elements made from locally sourced standard components.
It will be used as a temporary theatre in Asakusa and then at a drama festival in the Kansai district, also maybe used by Issey Miyake in New York.