Tadao Ando
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Tadao Ando (安藤 å¿ é›„, AndÅ Tadao?, born September 13, 1941, in Osaka, Japan) is a Japanese architect whose approach to architecture was once categorised 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.[1] He donated the $100,000 prize money to the orphans of the 1995 Kobe earthquake.[2]
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[edit] Buildings and works
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 than disturbing the landscape by making it conform to the constructed space of a building). The architect's buildings are often characterized by complex three-dimensional circulation paths. These paths interweave between interior and exterior spaces formed both inside large-scale geometric shapes and in the spaces between them.
His "Row House in Sumiyoshi" (Azuma House, ä½å‰ã®é•·å±‹), a small two-story, cast-in-place concrete house completed in 1976, is an early work that begins to show elements of his characteristic style. It consists of three equally sized rectangular volumes: two enclosed volumes of interior spaces separated by an open courtyard. By nature of the courtyard's position between the two interior volumes, it becomes an integral part of the house's circulation system.
Ando's housing complex at Rokko, just outside Kobe, is a complex warren of terraces and balconies and atriums and shafts. The designs for Rokko Housing One (1983) and for Rokko Housing Two (1993) illustrate a range of issues in the traditional architectural vocabulary -- the interplay of solid and void, the alternatives of open and closed, the contrasts of light and darkness. More significantly, Ando's noteworthy achievement in these clustered buildings is site specific -- the structures survived undamaged after the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995.[3] New York Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger argues convincingly that "Ando is right in the Japanese tradition: spareness has always been a part of Japanese architecture, at least since the 16th century; [and] it is not for nothing that Frank Lloyd Wright more freely admitted to the influences of Japanese architecture than of anything American."[3] Like Ando, Wright's site specific decision-making anticipated seismic activity; and like Ando's several HyÅgo-Awaji buildings, Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo did survive the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.[4]
[edit] Completed projects gallery, selected
Honpuku Temple(Water Temple)
Azuma House
Rokko Housing One and Two
Times Gallery
Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art
Kobe Waterfront Plaza built with the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art
Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
[edit] Completed projects list
[edit] Projects in progress
[edit] Awards
[edit] References
[edit] External links
