For Tadao Ando, the self-taught architect maverick, drawing is thinking. Known for austere yet elegant concrete buildings with knife-sharp edges, Ando brings his ideas to life with just a few freehand pencil lines and an energetically scribbled tornado of a single pastel color.

Glimpses of this wild artistic sensibility appear throughout monographs on Ando’s work, and his hand-drawings have been shown in exhibitions before — most recently this summer in “Youth” in his hometown of Osaka, and earlier in the sweeping "Tadao Ando: Endeavors" at the National Art Center, Tokyo, in 2017. “Tadao Ando. Sketches, Drawings & Architecture,” published by Taschen last month, flips the script. It focuses solely on his rough architectural sketches, drawings, and a few plans and photos. It’s an unconventional monograph of architecture in that it highlights the process and ideas instead of polished results, while also celebrating the now-declining craft of hand-drawn architectural illustration.

“For me ... exquisite computer-graphic expressions do not have sufficient strength to become the genesis of a new era,” Ando, 84, writes in the book’s foreword. “Instead, I am more attracted to the cobbled-together study models and rough line sketches that are generated in the process of struggling to arrive at these shapes.”

Tadao Ando’s new book of sketches and art is a hefty tome of 750 artworks over 594 pages. | COURTESY OF TADAO ANDO AND TASCHEN

The book covers 50 years of Tadao Ando’s work which includes his iconic Church of Light. | COURTESY OF TADAO ANDO AND TASCHEN

“Tadao Ando. Sketches, Drawings & Architecture” cannot be consumed on the go. It demands your attention with its nearly 5 kilograms of weight. It’s a hefty tome of 750 works spread over 594 pages, covering five decades of Ando’s career from 1975 to now.

The book opens with the architect’s private sketches from his travels, from the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain, to a cave temple at Ajanta, India. The observational urban sketches give way to drawings for projects that include technical elements such as cross sections and dimensions scribbled in the margins.

Initial sketches show how some of Ando’s buildings that later became architectural landmarks began as simple visual notes. An early sketch of the Church of Light — an example of minimalist architecture with a cross created out of empty space and light — resembles an ancient rune of intersecting lines. The 21_21 Design Site museum in Roppongi, Tokyo, is a whirlwind of pencil marks, while the initial idea for the Hill of the Buddha in Hokkaido is painted in pink swathes over a photograph of the site. Benesse House Oval, one of the first few buildings on the Naoshima “art island,” is shown scrawled in the corner of a magazine in French.

The choice to focus on the process and architectural vision rather than the finished work makes it a an unconventional monograph. | COURTESY OF TADAO ANDO AND TASCHEN

Benesse House Oval, one of the first few buildings on the Naoshima “art island,” is shown scrawled in the corner of a magazine in French. | COURTESY OF TADAO ANDO AND TASCHEN

Ando also supplies several versions of some buildings, showing how an initial rough idea is expanded and refined.

Ultimately, the collection is about inspiration and vision as much as it is about architecture, art and illustration.

“This ‘digital revolution,’ which can be likened to the prior Industrial Revolution, will continue to increase in intensity and produce new forms for a world that we cannot even imagine,“ Ando writes. “Our imaginations may expand endlessly, shaping the invisible scenes in our minds — this is the never-ending story of architecture, full of joy and pain, which will continue unchanged a century and more into the future.”

The book also contains Ando’s personal sketches from the travels in his youth. | COURTESY OF TADAO ANDO AND TASCHEN