Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando (born 1941) is a Japanese architect, born in Osaka. He has no formal architectural education: he boxed professionally for a time, studied drawing and design through night classes and correspondence courses, and traveled to see buildings by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn. He opened his office in Osaka in the late 1960s and received the Pritzker Prize in 1995.

He builds mainly in smooth, exposed cast concrete, marked only by the regular grid of formwork panels and tie holes, and uses courtyards, water and narrow openings for daylight within simple geometric plans. The Row House in Sumiyoshi, Osaka (1976), is a narrow concrete box divided by an open-air courtyard that occupants cross to move between rooms. The Church of the Light in Ibaraki, Osaka (1989), has a cross-shaped opening cut through the concrete wall behind the altar. The Water Temple on Awaji Island (1991) is entered by a stairway leading down through a lotus pond.

On the island of Naoshima he designed Benesse House (1992) and the Chichu Art Museum (2004), which is built largely underground. In the United States he designed the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis (2001) and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2002). He has also converted historic buildings into galleries, including the Punta della Dogana in Venice (2009) and the Bourse de Commerce in Paris (2021).