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5/10/2001

Tadao Ando - Architect

Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis

In this special exhibition, the Saint Louis Art Museum presents a rare opportunity to experience and study the vision of one of the world's foremost architects. Designed especially for the Saint Louis Art Museum by Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, the installation features 17 projects with models, drawings, photographs and videos. The exhibition will also include several full-scale architectural elements and a reflecting pool that were created to enhance the unique viewing experience. Tadao Ando: Architect is on view October 6 through December 30 to complement the October 17 opening in St. Louis of The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, Ando’s first public building in the United States.

Tadao Ando is among the most distinguished and sought after architects practicing in the world today. His buildings are excessively personal statements, blending international modernism with Japanese architectural traditions. In 1995, he was named the eighteenth Laureate of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize for the enhancement of art in architecture. The citation from the jury proclaimed Ando's achievements.

Tadao Ando is that rare architect who combines artistic and intellectual sensitivity in a single individual capable of producing buildings, large and small, that both serve and inspire. His powerful inner vision ignores whatever movements, schools or styles that might be current, creating buildings with form and composition related to the kind of life that will be lived there.

Born in Osaka, Japan, Ando continues to live in his boyhood home, where a neighboring carpentry shop provided some of his earliest influences. By his early twenties, Ando had decided on a self-directed course of architectural study that took him from Osaka throughout Japan, to Europe, Africa and to the United States. With no formal training in architecture, he traveled with a sketchbook - a practice he continues today - studying the works of architects such as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn before returning to Osaka at the age of 28 to open his own studio, Tadao Ando Architect & Associates.

Self-educated, fiercely independent, and a master craftsman, Tadao Ando is praised as a builder as much as an architect. His powerful and evocative exteriors belie their intimate interiors that unite nature and form in serene environments. Referring to one of his earliest structures - a small concrete row house in central Osaka - as "the point of origin" for his subsequent work, Ando described its interior as a "simple composition with diverse spaces dramatized by light."

Now, at the age of 60, having received some of architecture's highest awards for his structures in Japan, Europe, and the United States, he is hailed as one of the preeminent living architects in the world. His emotionally powerful work is identified by exquisitely proportioned pristine geometric forms, made of concrete and glass, by thick exterior walls that shield the austere intimate interior spaces, and by the particularly sensitive way he integrates architecture with the landscape and nature, using water, light and greenery to create contemplative environments. The mystical beauty of his work elicits a heightened visceral - even spiritual - reaction that is rare in contemporary architecture.

Funding for this exhibition was provided, in part, through the generosity of American Airlines.

Organized by:
Saint Louis Art Museum

Curator
Cara McCarty, The Grace L. Brumbaugh and Richard E. Brumbaugh Curator of Decorative Arts and Design Admission Admission to Tadao Ando: Architect is $5 for adults; $4 for seniors and students; $3 for children 6-12; and free for children younger than 6. The exhibition is free to everyone on Tuesdays. Free to Museum Members at all times. Admission to the Museum and its permanent collection is always free.

The Saint Louis Art Museum is situated in Forest Park, one of the largest urban parks in the United States, just west of downtown St. Louis, Missouri. Follow this link for a map of the Museum campus.

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