The young boxer turned self-trained architect mastered a signature style of

concrete and shadow in Japan before exploding onto the global scene

In his 1977 essay In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki wrote that ‘we find beauty not in
the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and darkness, that one thing against
another creates’. Tanizaki’s words closely resonate with the work of Tadao Ando, vividly
expressed in the dramatic diagonal shadows and light of his formational Koshino House
(1981), cast across the double-height exposed concrete living room wall and contrasting with
the dynamic shadows on the curved wall of the extension added by the architect in 1984.
Ando’s sketches and rendered sections of the house draw on the light interacting with
concrete walls: ‘The traces of the concrete formwork, the imprint of the separators, the sharp
corners and homogeneous surfaces all contain powerful hidden expression behind the calm
material’, he wrote in 1989. He continued: ‘I chose this route rather than the vivid, plastic use
of space Le Corbusier favored in his later work, perhaps from my having been raised in a
culture of paper and wood’.
Ando thereby references Tanizaki’s description of a traditional world in tension with
contemporary culture in reference to his own architectural design. As he proclaimed, ‘I
believe that the act of living is a constant struggle between the residents and the house, and
the same goes for the process of creating by the architect’. Ando’s primary quest is to
consider those ‘intimate relations between material and form, and between volume and
human life’.

The origins of Ando’s fight as an architect can be found in his bouts with boxing as a youth.
First entering the local boxing circuit while still in high school, he was inspired to end his
professional boxing career and pursue architecture after seeing the Imperial Hotel (1923) in
Tokyo by Frank Lloyd Wright. Nonetheless, such physical training was formative for Ando
as he embarked on his lifelong fight to create powerful architectural form, continuing to train
in shadowboxing: attacking both the unseen and seen forces in the creative tension inherent in
his design process.

Following years of self-study in architecture through courses in drawing and extensive travel
around the world between 1962 and 1969, learning about great architecture through direct
experience and sketching in his twenties, Ando established his independent practice through
the design of small houses. The Row House at Sumiyoshi (1976) became his personal
architectural manifesto in its minimalist exposed concrete form, directly contrasting with the
adjacent timber-frame traditional nagaya townhouses. Its iconic concrete facade with a
singular central opening for the door stood in direct opposition to the porous wood and paper
screens of its neighbors, while maintaining the same overall width, height and depth.

Here the residents’ daily struggle could be seen in the need to constantly pass through the
central court from the bedroom to the bathroom, exposed to both rain and light. For Ando,
such challenges were inherent in traditional dwelling and forced residents to be in direct
contact with natural forces. Architecture, according to Ando, ‘reduces nature to its original
elements – light, wind, and air, and, conversely, sublimates it as an abstraction through a
dynamic resonance with geometry’. Ando’s direct attitude to embracing nature subsequently
inspired his designs of sacred space.

Just as his boxing hero, Fighting Harada, rose from humble beginnings to become a world
boxing champion, Ando emerged from the shadows of his early years to the global spotlight.
Following his inclusion as a member of the New Wave of Japanese Architects in 1978 at the
Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, Ando rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as a
‘critical regionalist’, in the words of Kenneth Frampton. In 1987, the self-trained architect
from Osaka would be invited to teach at the Ivy League Universities in the United
States: Yale in 1987, Columbia in 1988 and Harvard in 1990.

In 1991, the Museum of Modern Art featured Ando in a solo exhibition, and he went on to
win the 1995 Pritzker Architecture Prize. In 1997, he was then named Professor at Tokyo
University, especially remarkable as he was neither a graduate of Tokyo University, nor
indeed any architecture programme, in a meteoric rise reminiscent of the legendary ascent of
the daimyo (feudal lord) Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who emerged without any traceable samurai
lineage.
Along with such world acclaim would come Ando’s task both to remain at the architectural
vanguard and to surpass his achievements. He continued to take inspiration from Frank Lloyd
Wright and Le Corbusier, now in terms of his longevity as a creative architect. Having
mastered the craft of concrete through the first decades of his career, Ando embraced the
challenge to maintain the same level of perfection with his newfound global prominence in
the 1990s. While he first received the commission to design the Pulitzer Arts Foundation
in St Louis, Missouri in 1991, it was to become a 10-year ordeal to realise – finally
completing in 2001 – with both a site change and battles with artists including Richard Serra,
in a dialogue between pure platonic space and dynamic sculptural form. While the foundation
was under construction, Ando designed and built the Eychaner Lee House, tackling the
problem of designing for the cold winters of Chicago in a completely different culture of
building construction and legal regulations. The house was completed in 1997, joined most
recently by his design of the adjacent Wrightwood 659 Gallery (2019).

Continuing to his next round of battles, Ando competed for the commission of the Fort Worth
Modern Art Museum (2002) with architects including Arata Isozaki, Richard Gluckman and
Ricardo Legorreta. Here, the main struggle was to build adjacent to Louis Kahn’s
masterpiece, whereby the new museum should ‘neither mimic the Kimball nor dispute its
primacy’. While internal concrete volumes would recall his Row House at Sumiyoshi, the
glazed volumes facing the lagoon have their own deferential presence with neither Ando nor
Kahn in each other’s shadow.

Ando’s early Koshino House, built for fashion designer Hiroko Koshino, was followed by
close associations with designers around the world including Issey Miyake, Tom Ford and
Karl Lagerfeld, who would in turn introduce him to fashion magnate François Pinault in
1996. This encounter would eventually lead to his winning the 2001 competition to design
the François Pinault Foundation for Contemporary Art on the site of a disused Renault
factory on the island of Seguin, three miles along the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. The
project presented him with the opportunity to realise his vision for the Nakanoshima Project
II in the heart of Paris, but the scheme was never built. Pinault instead moved his collection
to Venice, where Ando realised contemporary art spaces in renovations of the Palazzo Grassi
(2006), followed by the Punta della Dogana Contemporary Art Center (2009), a
transformation of the former customs house at the entrance to the Grand Canal. Through
dogged persistence, Ando realised his vision to build an egg-shaped dome over the
underground concourse in Shibuya station in Tokyo in 2006.

Within the last decade, at the peak of his profession, Ando faced a battle against cancer,
which necessitated the removal of his gallbladder and duodenum, followed by his pancreas
and spleen. While his health would limit his international travel, his perseverance did not
wane and he surpassed expectations to maintain his strength and recover. In 2016, Ando
embarked on a project to renovate the Bourse de Commerce into another art museum for
Pinault. The design features a 10 metre-high, 30 metre-wide concrete cylinder within the
central rotunda of the historic commodities exchange building, situated between the Centre
Pompidou and the Louvre in the heart of Paris. With its mid-2020 projected completion, he
will in essence realise the vision he had for Nakanoshima, to create a truly civic cultural
space in one of the most prominent locations in the world.

Although not his original plan, Ando will eventually build on Nakanoshima, leading the
campaign to plant 3,000 cherry trees along its promenade, and will open his Nakanoshima
Children’s Book Forest library this year, to inspire children to appreciate the importance of
books and lead them along their own path from darkness to light. As Ando himself has
professed, ‘There is no way of knowing what the future holds in both life and with
architecture. So long as you do not stop thinking ahead or thinking forward, architecture will
never end. It is always in process.’