Tadao Andō

Tadao Andō (born September 13, 1941, Ōsaka, Japan) is one of Japan’s leading contemporary architects. He is best known for his minimalist concrete buildings.

Andō had various careers, including professional boxer, before he became a self-taught architect and opened his own practice in Ōsaka in 1969. In the 1970s and ’80s he executed a series of mostly small-scale, often residential buildings in Japan, such as the Azuma House (1976) in Ōsaka and the Koshino House (19781) in Ashiya. In these early commissions, he used beautifully detailed reinforced concrete walls, a form that gave his buildings a massive minimalist appearance and simple contemplative interior spaces. These works established the aesthetic Andō would continue throughout his career: essentially Modernist, coming out of the tradition of Le Corbusier’s experiments with concrete, his work is also rooted in the spirituality of Japanese architectural space. Andō’s structures were often in harmony with their natural environments, taking advantage of natural light in a dramatically expressive way. In his Church of Light (1990) in the Ōsaka suburb of Ibaraki, for example, a cruciform shape is cut out of the concrete wall behind the altar; when daylight hits the outside of this wall, a cross of light is generated within the interior.

As his reputation spread, Andō received a number of commissions outside Japan that allowed him to continue his aesthetic in more-public spaces. Important works from the 1990s include the Ando Gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago (1992); the Japanese Pavilion (1992) at Expo ’92 in Sevilla, Spain; and the UNESCO Meditation Space (1996) in Paris. He continued to design large-scale projects in the 21st century. Notable examples are the Giorgio Armani Theatre (2001) in Milan; the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (2001) in St. Louis, Missouri; the Modern Art Museum (2003) in Fort Worth, Texas; and the Chichu Art Museum (2004) in Naoshima, Japan. In 2006 Andō’s renovation of the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, opened, showcasing a selection of art from the collection of luxury-goods mogul François Pinault. Andō later added a theatre (2013) to the building and renovated the Punta della Dogana (2009), also in Venice, to showcase additional pieces belonging to Pinault. The partnership continued with the renovation of the Bourse de Commerce (2021), Paris, another home for Pinault’s vast collection. Andō’s other projects from this period include 21_21 Design Sight (2007), a museum in Tokyo; the school of art, design, and architecture (2013) at the University of Monterrey, Mexico; the Poly Grand Theater (2014), Shanghai; an extension to the Clark Art Institute (2014), Williamstown, Massachusetts (2014); and the He Art Museum (2020), Shunde, China.

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Andō’s consistent aesthetic won him numerous international awards, including the Carlsberg Architectural Prize (1992), the Pritzker Prize (1995), and gold medals from both the Royal Institute of British Architects (1997) and the American Institute of Architects (2002). In 1996 he also received the Praemium Imperiale prize for architecture, one of the six categories of global arts prizes awarded annually by the Japan Arts Association.