Tadao Ando
Tadao Ando was a boxer before he became an architect and learned the profession by travelling and reading. His buildings in smooth concrete, such as the Church of the Light, unite modernism and Japanese tradition in spaces of light and silence.
Tadao Ando was born in 1941 in Osaka and grew up with his grandmother. For a time he was a professional boxer. He had no formal training in architecture but learned by working with carpenters, reading and travelling. He travelled in Europe, the United States and Africa in the early 1960s and studied, among other things, Le Corbusier’s buildings. In 1969 he opened an office in Osaka, where he still works.
Ando’s breakthrough was a small terraced house in Osaka, the Azuma House, 1976, a concrete box with an open courtyard in the middle. He developed an architecture of smooth, carefully cast concrete, with light falling in through slits and openings. Among his well-known works are the Church of the Light in Ibaraki, the Church on the Water in Hokkaido and museums on the island of Naoshima, where art and architecture are united with the landscape. He has also designed the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St Louis, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the conversion of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris for the Pinault Collection.
Ando received the Pritzker Prize in 1995. He is one of the best-known architects in the world and has taught at several universities, including the University of Tokyo. His way of working with concrete, light and nature has influenced architects far beyond Japan. He has called his architecture an attempt to bring people back to nature in the city.