The University of Osaka and The Nippon Foundation Center for Infectious Diseases (大阪大学・日本財団 感染症センター)

On 14 September 2021 the University of Osaka and the Nippon Foundation announced a joint ten-year programme of 23 billion yen against infectious diseases, funded by the foundation and including the building of a research hub. In December 2021 the university announced that Tadao Ando had agreed to design the concept of this research building. Construction was completed at the end of February 2025.

For Ando, infectious diseases are a problem for humanity as a whole, but also a matter that touches each person inwardly, through inequalities between regions or discrimination; he says he designed the building with in mind the role of a "Spaceship Earth" that helps to resolve them from several angles.

The building is an ellipse of ten storeys above ground, with some 17,600 m2 of floor area. Ando says he wanted an architecture whose form and systems suggest the passage of the wind. On the easily reached ground floor, an open piloti enclosed in clear glass holds the seminar rooms where people gather; the upper floors concentrate advanced research facilities, so that people, knowledge and information from all over the world cross paths there.

The facade is made of cast aluminium louvres that shield against the sun; with high-efficiency equipment, control by CO2 level and a better-performing envelope, the building reaches the ZEB Ready standard. The overall design and design supervision fall to Ando's office; the basic plan was drawn up by the university with Meiho Facility Works, and the design-build was entrusted to a joint venture of Taisei and Nikken Sekkei.

The building hosts the teaching and research of the university's centre for infectious diseases (CiDER). The ground floor has a large hall of about 290 m2 seating 150; on the sixth floor, a shared laboratory with state-of-the-art instruments is open to researchers from inside and outside the university. The rooms can also be booked by people from outside the university.

It is a working research building, seen from the outside, on the Suita campus.