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awards: 1995 Pritzker Prize, 2002 AIA, AIA, Pritzker Prize

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. Tadao Ando's list of recommended/significant buildings (post 1980):

• Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain by Frank Gehry
• Church of the Light, Osaka, Japan by Tado Ando
• Jewish Museum, Berlin by Daniel Libeskind
• Queen Elizabeth II Great Court at the British Museum, London by Norman Foster
• Culture and Congress Center, Lucerne, Switzerland by Jean Nouvel
• New York Times Building, New York by Renzo Piano

All sites for Tadao Ando:

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