Tadao Ando

Architect

• Born: September 13, 1941
• Place of Birth: Place of birth: Minato-ku, Osaka, Japan

Education:Self-taught

Significance: Tadoe Ando is an architect who has designed buildings in his native Japan and throughout the world. Ando is renowned for integrating a building into its setting and incorporating the key natural elements of water, light, wind, sky, and landscape, so that the building is harmonious with nature.

Background

Tadoe Ando was born in Minato-ku in the Japanese city of Osaka on September 13, 1941. He has a twin brother but he did not grow up with him. When Ando was a toddler, his parents sent him to live with his grandmother and he adopted her last name. His brother, Takao Kitayama, was raised by their parents.

Ando confessed that he did not enjoy school and preferred studying real-life objects and situations to learning in a classroom. He frequently visited construction sites to watch the erection of buildings. When he was a pre-teen, a neighbor who was a carpenter taught him basic woodworking skills, and Ando began making wooden models of ships, planes, and the molds used to shape concrete in a technique the Japanese call shuttering.

In lieu of completing high school, Ando studied buildings. He also took up boxing for a time, but abandoned the sport when he decided to become an architect after he turned eighteen. Ando took some correspondence courses in art and design but did not attend college. Instead, he visited and studied temples, tea houses, and other nearby buildings. During the 1960s, he traveled to the United States and Europe, using a notebook to capture his own hand-drawn images of the architecture he saw along the way—a technique he has used throughout his career.

Ando also worked directly with design professionals and city planners and augmented his self-taught architectural skills by reading about the subject. He read a large volume written by architect Le Corbusier (1887 – 1965) that he purchased in a secondhand bookstore. He spent hours tracing the lines of the buildings in the pictures until he blackened all the pages. Le Corbusier’s use of concrete inspired Ando’s choice of materials in nearly all his designs. Ando even named his dog after the famed architect.

Life’s Work

While the traditional Japanese structures that surrounded Ando during his youth are made mostly of wood and paper, he has made a career out of transforming concrete and glass into simple and functional structures. The final concrete surface of the building is important to his overall look. Ando does not cover or coat the concrete, and the inside angles of the molds used to form each section and the impressions of the bolts that hold them together are part of the design even after the molds are removed.

Ando has worked on different types of buildings, including houses, churches, and museums. Ando is known for his work in concrete, but the first designs he created were made of wood. His first significant project in concrete was a simple structure known as Azuma House, built in Osaka in 1976. It was this project—designed with a door that appears to be a simple cut in one side of the structure—that established Ando’s trademark style.

One of his earliest large projects, Row House in Sumiyoshi, Osaka, was also built in 1976. The building’s design includes three equally sized rectangular spaces—two buildings with a courtyard area between them—where both the buildings and the space form part of the complete structure.

Ando worked with the idea of structures and spaces in two housing complexes built a decade apart known as Rokko Housing One (1983) and Rokko Housing Two (1993). Combining the strength of concrete with a design that took into consideration the sites on which the buildings were constructed, Ando’s complexes withstood a 1995 earthquake that demolished many nearby buildings.

In his forty-plus-year career, Ando has also designed a number of churches in both the sparse, zen-inspired Japanese style and in the Christian style. These include the Church on the Water at Tomamu (1988), the Church of the Light in Osaka (1989), and the Shingonshu Honpukuji Water Temple, Hyogo (1991). The Church of the Light features a large concrete wall divided into quadrants by thin windows that form a cross of light when the sun shines in.

All of Ando’s work features a play of light against the structure’s materials and elements of nature such as water and air. His designs are planned to enhance the building’s purpose and the experience of the people who enter, whether the building is a home, place of worship, museum, or commercial structure. He has said he works to restore the unity between the building and nature that is lost when construction becomes fast and utilitarian.

Ando has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gold Medal of Architecture from the French Academy of Architects (1989), the Carlsberg Architectural Prize (1992), and the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (2002). When he won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1995, Ando donated the $100,000 prize money to help children orphaned by the Kobe earthquake that occurred that same year.

While Ando works throughout the world, he lives and works in his hometown of Osaka. He works at the firm he founded in 1970, Tadao Ando Architect & Associates. Ando—who has never attended a formal class in architecture—has been a visiting instructor at Columbia University, Harvard University, University of California at Berkeley, and Yale University.

Although Ando's work is revered in the architectural world, one of his designed structures made the news for the changes its owner made to it. In 2024, a 4000-square foot Malibu home originally designed by Ando for financier Richard Sachs in 2013 was sold for millions less than the owner, the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, had paid for it. The property lost value because it was stripped of the ocean-facing windows, electricity, and other original features at the request of the owner. The house, which sustained significant damage due to being exposed to the elements, was sold for $39 million, far less than the $53 West paid for it.

Impact

Despite his lack of formal training, Ando has risen to the top of his field and set a precedent for stepping outside the traditional bounds of architecture in combining light and air with construction materials. His use of large, concrete walls adorned only with simple windows that allow light to be part of the structure’s décor has provided a model for creating grandeur without incorporating expensive and fancy decorative materials.

Personal

Ando lives and works in Osaka. His unique studio has two floors beneath the ground and five above. His wife Yumiko Ando manages the studio and is his translator.

Bibliography

Cassady, Daniel. "New Report Details How Kanye West Stripped Away Parts of His Tadao Ando–Designed Home." Art News, 13 June 2024, www.artnews.com/art-news/news/kanye-west-tadao-ando-new-yorker-investigation-1234709825/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.

Ekshikka, S. "12 Fun Fact About Tadoe Ando." Arch20,n.d. Web. 27 June 2016.

Laurberg, Lise. ArcSpace.com,n.d. Web. 27 June 2016.

Rosenfeld, Karissa. "Tadao Ando Wins 2016 Isamu Noguchi Award." ArchDaily, Dec. 2015. Web. 27 June 2016.

"Tadoe Ando." Architravel,n.d. Web. 27 June 2016.

"Tadoe Ando." Vitra.com,n.d. Web. 27 June 2016.

"Tadoe Ando." Yoshi Gallery,n.d.Web. 27 June 2016.

"Tadoe Ando: 1995 Laureate." Pritzker Architecture Prize, 1995. Web 27 June 2016.

"Tadoe Ando Biography." Tadoe Ando Official Website,n.d. Web. 27 June 2016.

"Tadoe Ando Says His First New York Building ‘Will Be a Very Quiet Piece of Architecture’." De Zeen Magazine, June 2015. Web. 27 June 2016.

Ekshikka, S. "12 Fun Fact About Tadoe Ando." Arch20,n.d. Web. 27 June 2016.