Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando (安藤 忠雄, Andō Tadao, born September 13, 1941, in Osaka, Japan) is a Japanese architect whose approach to architecture was once categorized as critical regionalism. Ando has led a storied life, working as a truck driver and boxer prior to settling on the profession of architecture, despite never having taken formal training in the field. He works primarily in exposed cast-in-place concrete and is renowned for an exemplary craftsmanship w... more

Tadao Ando (安藤 忠雄, Andō Tadao, born September 13, 1941, in Osaka, Japan) is a Japanese architect whose approach to architecture was once categorized as critical regionalism. Ando has led a storied life, working as a truck driver and boxer prior to settling on the profession of architecture, despite never having taken formal training in the field. He works primarily in exposed cast-in-place concrete and is renowned for an exemplary craftsmanship which invokes a Japanese sense of materiality, junction and spatial narrative through the pared aesthetics of international modernism. In 1969, he established the firm Tadao Ando Architects & Associates. In 1995, Ando won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the highest distinction in the field of architecture. He donated the $100,000 prize money to the orphans of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Tadao Ando's body of work is known for the creative use of natural light and for architectures that follow the natural forms of the landscape (rather... less