Biography
Tadao Ando, Architect
Tadao Ando was born in Osaka in 1941. In 1962 he started his chiefly self-taught architectural training, travelling through the United States, Europe and Africa until 1969 when he founded Tadao Ando Architect & Associates in Osaka. In 1972 he built the Tomishima house in Osaka, the first of a long series of single-family homes; one of these, the Azuma house (1976), again in Osaka, brought him to the attention of international critics and, in 1979, earned him the Architectural Institute of Japan's annual award.
He won even further acclaim during the Eighties both in his own country and abroad: in 1983 the first stage of the Rokko housing complex in Kobe was given the Japanese Cultural Design Prize; in 1985 the Finnish Architects' Association awarded him the Alvar Aalto medal; in 1986 the church on Mount Rokko, Kobe, was completed and Ando received the Japanese Ministry of Education's annual prize, the Mainichi Art Prize (1987), the Isoya Yoshida Award (1988), and the Medaille d'or of the Academie d'Architecture Française (1989).
Some of his most important works of the past few years are the Church on the Water, Hokkaido (1988), the Church of Light in Ibaraki (1989), the Museum of Literature, Himeji, and the Temple on the Water, Awahji, completed in 1991. In 1992 he designed the Japanese pavilion at Seville Expo, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Naoshima and begun the Fabrica project in Treviso. In 1993 the second stage of the Rokko housing complex, Kobe, was completed, followed by a third stage finished in 1999.
In addition to numerous honorary fellowships - of the American Institute of Architects (1991), the Royal Institute of British Architects (1993), the Bund Deutscher Architekten (1997), the Academie d'Architecture Française and the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (1998) - and the many awards given to him all over the world, in 1995 Ando was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
From the mid-Nineties to the present day he has created a series of remarkable works, including the Chikatsu-Asuka Historical Museum, Minamikawachi, and the Suntory Museum, Osaka (1994), the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum annexe (1995), the Daylight Museum (Hiroki Oda Museum) in Gamo-gun (1998). Tadao Ando Architect & Associates has taken part in several international competitions, winning those for the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (1997), for the Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Modern Art (1997), for the Manchester City Centre Piccadilly Gardens' Regeneration (1999), for St John's Abbey, Minnesota (2000).
Visiting professor at Yale (1987), Columbia (1988) and Harvard (1990), Ando has taught at Tokyo University since 1997. His work has been the subject of many exhibitions: at New York's MOMA (1991), at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1993), at the Royal Institute of British Architects (1994) and the Royal Academy of Arts (1998), London, at the Palladian Basilica, Vicenza (1995), at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (1998), and at the Galerie Aedes East in Berlin (1999).
