Surrounded by the wooded hills of Museum SAN in Wonju, South Korea, architect Tadao Ando has finished Drawing of Space, a meditative, concrete dome which will serve as a permanent residence to British artist Antony Gormley’s “Expansion Field” installation. Buried in the ground, this spherical, underground museum provides a minimalist but holy spatial experience that takes into account silence, light, mass, and the elusiveness of space.
The new building is one of a two-decade collaboration between Museum SAN and Ando, who originally designed and opened it in 2013. This underground expansion is the latest milestone in the long history of cooperation between Museum SAN and Tadao Ando.
As renowned for the use of materials in their most primal state, light manipulation, and spatial simplicity as he is for his provocative stance, Ando offers a space that enfolds and enhances the experience of Gormley’s sculptures, specifically, those examining the human form abstracted and the illusoriness of space.
A Dialogue in Silence
Entitled Drawing of Space, the museum is as much an architectural gesture as a religious practice. Underground and entered through a tunnel, the building is a sheer concrete dome buried in the ground, gradually materialising as one moves down into stillness. It is not just a space but a ritualised spatial experience, where architecture slows down time and orients one’s senses inward towards reflection.
The dome, made of cast-in-place concrete, features surfaces of unblemished detail that reproduce the precision of the material and maker in a position that rejects ornament and curved form, both signatures of Ando’s minimalist style, his “haiku” of architecture. But project innovation is in how it courts invisibility. Placed beneath the surface, the dome resists monumentality. It doesn’t overwhelm Museum SAN’s topography.
Natural Light as Material
Light has always played a major role in Tadao Ando’s structures. Natural light enters the space, filtered through slits cut into the concrete at carefully measured angles. These beams of light are a temporal sculpture, varying by day and bringing shadow and light to animate Gormley’s static geometry.
The light dances across the dome, echoing Gormley’s work with space as a discipline, moving, ephemeral, and related to the perception of the body. The combined vocabulary of minimalism, silence, and elemental form creates the most poignant dialogue between Ando and Gormley.
A Powerful Sculptural Installation
The interior was designed to contain Gormley’s Expansion Field, 60 pieces of cast-iron, solid cast, each of which is reduced from the human form and placed in a grid. Formal rigidity of sculpture is reflected in the geometry of the dome. The spaces articulate Gormley’s investigation into the boundaries of embodiment and space.
The exhibition unfolds across three galleries. In the first Gallery, Liminal Field, consists of seven sculptures of bubble-shaped, cellular units that imply changing body boundaries and pose questions of the nature of space perception.
Gallery 2 is filled with drawings and prints that complement Gormley’s sculpted forms, addressing overriding questions such as body vs. building, mass and volume, and the sensory conflict between touch and vision.
Gallery 3 consists of a room-sized Orbit form with crossing aluminum rings, some suspended, others affixed to the floor, inviting passersby to move through. The piece, as Gormley describes, is an exercise in exaggerated body awareness through the employment of movement.
A Legacy of Collaboration and Craft
Drawing of Space is the newest addition to the Museum SAN campus, developed by Ando, which also comprises the Meditation Hall, James Turrell Exhibition Wing, and Flower Garden. Each of these spaces is a reflection of Ando’s design philosophy of space purity and depth of emotion. With this new addition, the museum solidifies its status as a world destination for meditative art and experiential architecture.
Ando’s dome elevates the landscape not by overwhelming it, but by blurring into it an act of humility and power. Minimalism brings out a statement that captures the essence of what’s being displayed. Just like the art itself, the space further enhances the display, making architecture the connecting medium of transformation, and thus creating a singular experience.
“Drawing of Space” Project Details
Project Name: Drawing of Space
Architects: Tadao Ando Architect & Associates
Location: Museum SAN, Wonju, South Korea
Photography / Renders: © MAG PR & Image
