A clifftop concrete house in Mirissa

Saturday, 30 July 2011 00:53 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

What does a philanthropist buy the wife as a present? Why, a concrete box, of course. A concrete box by the ‘starchitect’ Tadao Ando with views of paradise (strap)

The Japanese architect Tadao Ando calls it ‘the house in Sri Lanka’ and he has set it against a paradise on earth.

White sandy beaches, dotted with palm trees and huts draped in coconut leaves, weave around cliffs in Mirissa on the southern tip of Sri Lanka. Crocodiles, monkeys, elephants and leopards roam freely in the jungle behind it.

Clad in exposed concrete, the house perches on top of a cliff, looking for all the world like the lair of a Bond villain. But in fact its owner, Pierre Pringiers, is an industrialist and philanthropist who built the house as a present for his wife, the artist Saskia Pintelon. ‘One day I asked my wife who was her favourite architect in the world, and she replied, “Tadao Ando,”’ he says.

The iconic images of Ando’s Church of Light, built in 1989 in Osaka, had made a deep impression on Pintelon. In this building Ando simply made a cross-shaped cut in the wall of a concrete box, and the transcendent beauty of the cross of light that flooded the space made Ando a household name in Japan and around the world.

With the Pringiers house Ando has taken a slightly different approach from his previous work, which has tended to be introspective with only minimal openings. Instead, he throws the house open to the magnificent landscape surrounding it, focusing on nothing but the sky and the sea of this tropical island, which is also the source of inspiration for Pintelon’s artwork.

Consequently, there are infinite ways in and out of the house. Two wings, running parallel to each other, pin the house down. The living-rooms, kitchen, master bedroom and four guest rooms – each one with a sea view and an en suite bathroom – are all vast: the sitting-room is a rectangular box 65ft long, which slices through the wings at an angle. The views from most of the rooms are of sea, sky or jungle, though many of them also have slits and lines of light recalling the Church of Light. (www.telegraph.co.uk)