Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando (1941-) is one of the major contemporary Japanese architects, famous worldwide for his minimalist poetics which manages to unite the Japanese architectural tradition with the stylistic features of Western modernism in a very personal way, giving life to ascetic and contemplative buildings. Self-taught, he drew inspiration in particular from the works of Le Corbusier and Louis Khan and made himself known in the 1970s thanks to the hermetic project of Casa Azuma, built in exposed reinforced concrete like many of his best-known works by he. His most famous project is the Church of Light in Osaka, an abstract space made up of a bare concrete cube in which the only source of light is a cross-shaped cut in the wall. Ando achieved international fame in 1992 with his project for the Japanese pavilion at the Seville Expo and since then he has also carried out numerous projects in the West, including the Fabrica research center created for Benetton, the Armani Theater in Milan or the Conference Pavilion commissioned by Vitra for the Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, the first building designed by Ando outside Japan. Among the numerous awards received during his career, the Pritzker Prize (1995) and the Imperial Prize (1996) are worth mentioning. Tadao Ando's unique experience with furniture design dates back to a special collaboration with the company Carl Hansen & Søn.