Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando was born in Osaka on 13 September 1941. He holds no architecture degree and had no master: after a brief spell as a boxer he taught himself, visiting the temples, shrines and tea houses of Kyoto and Nara, reading, and then travelling through Europe and the United States in the 1960s to see the buildings for himself, sketchbook in hand. A book on Le Corbusier bought from a secondhand bookshop left such a mark that he traced its drawings until the pages turned black; he set out in 1965 to meet the architect, only to reach Paris a month after his death. He founded his office in Osaka in 1969 and made his name with the Row House in Sumiyoshi (1976), a small concrete house that won the Architectural Institute of Japan's prize in 1979.

Reinforced concrete is his material and light his subject. His thick walls close a space in on itself, "a zone for oneself within society", as he puts it, and it is inside that enclosure that light and wind are let in, through a slit or a measured opening: in the Church of the Light (Ibaraki, 1989), a cross of light appears through slits cut in the wall. For Bill Lacy, executive director of the Pritzker jury, a key part of his philosophy is the creation of boundaries within which introspective domains take shape, where people can relate to light and shadow, wind and water, away from the surrounding urban chaos. This "smooth-as-silk" concrete is both structure and surface, never plastered over; its quality depends on tight, varnished wooden formwork, whose bolts leave the regular small holes that have become his signature. Ando seeks to restore to the house the unity with nature, light and wind, that the modernisation of Japanese housing had lost.

Water and landscape matter as much to him as concrete. At the Water Temple on Awaji (1991), visitors descend a staircase that cuts through a lotus pond about 40 metres across to reach the hall beneath it; the Church on the Water at Tomamu (1988) faces an artificial lake, and Times in Kyoto runs along the Takase River just above the water. He sometimes places his buildings underground, as at the Forest of Tombs Museum in Kumamoto, with its stairs and buried spaces.

The Pritzker Prize was presented to him in 1995 at the Grand Trianon in Versailles (he is the third Japanese laureate); the Praemium Imperiale followed in 1996, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1997, the Kyoto Prize and the AIA Gold Medal in 2002, the UIA Gold Medal in 2005 and the Order of Culture in 2010. After the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, he chaired a ten-year committee devoted to reconstruction. Since 2002, the island of Naoshima (Kagawa) has been his most sustained site: the Chichū Art Museum, founded in 2004, mostly buried so as not to spoil the landscape of the Seto Inland Sea, with works by Claude Monet, James Turrell and Walter De Maria installed permanently; the ANDO MUSEUM, a concrete core slipped into a wooden house about a hundred years old in the Honmura district; and, in spring 2025, the new Naoshima museum, the tenth facility of the Benesse Art Site Naoshima to bear his signature, on three levels, two of them underground. In Osaka he designed and gave to the city the Nakanoshima Children's Book Forest (Kodomo Hon no Mori), opened in July 2020, and then designed the Infectious Disease Centre of the University of Osaka on its Suita campus, ten storeys completed at the end of February 2025 around a "Spaceship Earth" concept. The Centre Pompidou devoted a major exhibition to him in 2018.

Outside Japan he has built in Europe and the United States. In Germany: the Vitra Seminar House (1993), near the Swiss border, on the grounds of Frank Gehry's furniture museum, and the Langen Foundation in Neuss (2004), on the former Hombroich rocket station that Karl-Heinrich Müller had invited him to see; it has two parallel cubes sunk nearly six metres into the ground. In Italy: the Benetton communication research centre in Treviso (2000), then, in Venice and for François Pinault's collection, the Palazzo Grassi (opening exhibition in April 2006) and the Punta della Dogana (2009). In France: the UNESCO Meditation Space in Paris (1995) and the Bourse de Commerce, converted into a museum of the Pinault Collection and inaugurated in 2021 with the exhibition "Ouverture". In Spain: the Japanese Pavilion at the Seville Expo (1992), built almost entirely of wood. In the United States: the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis (2001), the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2002) and the Clark Center at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown (2014).