An editor of an international magazine once told us that when Tadao Ando first went to lecture in America, his Western audience thought he was an “idiot.”

Ando was not talking about architecture in the way that they were used to. He would explain how he mixed the off-form concrete to achieve the desired smoothness in a project, the kind of aggregate he would use in another project, what requirements his clients had, how he did this and that — i.e. the specifics of each project. They thought he was not intellectual enough, because he didn’t have an underlying “design philosopy.” He needn’t worry because shortly after, Western theorists firmly slotted him under the label “critical regionalism” (together with Charles Correa in India and Hassan Fathy in Egypt). Later, growing accustomed to the way one’s architecture had to be articulated in the West at that time, Ando began to talk about how his architecture would interact with nature, how shadows and light made his spaces poetic, how his architecture rejuvenated in a contemporary way the characters of traditional Japanese ideas of space, using words like “ma.” In retrospect, we could say his architecture closely matched the talk of the mid-eighties through the mid-nineties.

In 1995, Rem Koolhaas published S,M,L,XL, which contained essays “Generic City” and “Singapore Songlines.” In the same year he started the “Project on the City” at Harvard, which looked at cities formed under non-Western modernities: the Pearl River Delta and Lagos. This interest in non-Western cities came out of his view that “newness” in the West was “exhausted.” Thus began the gradual shift from talking about architecture as a “building,” to architecture as part of “urban phenomena.” The idea of architecture expanded beyond being the “magnificent play of masses brought together in light,” beyond being a metaphor, beyond signifying something else. Rem, OMA, and the Dutch School help transformed the landscape of architecture, from architecture as “building” to architecture as “thinking,” as “intelligence.”

In Japan in the late ’90s, Atelier Bow Wow also began to talk about architecture in their own way. They went beyond “ma,” beyond the abstract one-liner formulation of the “invisible order” within Tokyo’s apparent visual “chaos,” to record particular concrete phenomena that one could observe in Tokyo. Pet Architecture and Made In Tokyo influenced an entire generation of students and young architects with their directness that sat uncomfortably outside Western “theory.” Outside of Japan, their thinking remains “novel,” but how to fit it in?

At around the same time, in their writings and lectures, Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima, actively related architecture to real, direct in-the-world human experiences, including non-architectural ones. Ignoring Western abstract readings of their work being an expression of “transience” or the “ephemeral,” they placed architecture back into a direct relationship with how one would use or experience it in a concrete sense. Though still not easy for Western audiences to appreciate (”their lecture was about nothing!”), after SANAA, now it becomes a little more possible for architects to talk directly about architecture in terms of “architecture”, without being called an “idiot.”