Tadao Ando: the architect’s life and key buildings

The story goes that Tadao Ando had become interested in building through watching carpenters work on his family home as a child. Then he saw a book on Le Corbusier in a second-hand bookshop, he saved up for it and it was through tracing the drawings in that book that he learnt architecture. Like his idol, Corb, Ando was self-taught. Now, it is chunky blockbuster books on the Japanese one-time boxer, which populate the shelves of show apartments, five-star hotels and upmarket design bookstores.

Tadao Ando: a master is born

Ando, who was born in Osaka in 1941, arrived on the global scene during the zenith of the decorative excesses of post-modernism in the 1980s. His work, with its austere concrete surfaces and dazzling light, admitted through slits and crosses for openings, also cast deep shadows, causing a sensation. He reinvigorated the rigour of modernism and his work ushered in minimalist architecture as a new global aspiration.

Establishing his practice in Osaka in 1968, Ando’s work was influenced by Western modernist architecture and tempered by an Eastern sensibility. There is much cliche written about the influence of zen on architecture but in Ando’s spare forms in which the void, the shadow, and often the absence of any obvious signs of comfort or domesticity, those assumptions do seem to ring true.

Tadao Ando’s early works