Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando, one-time truck driver and boxer, is a self-taught Japanese architect whose winning of the 1995 Pritzker Prize has given him preeminence among his gifted generation. Ando reinvents Japan's architectural tradition in contemporary terms, using minimalist concrete structures of monumental scale, reminiscent of the Brutalist architecture of America's Louis Kahn. Almost all of Ando's works are in Japan, many in his native Osaka. Richard Pare's photographs of Ando's buildings, lovingly reproduced here, have drawn praise from Ando himself, who describes them as having "a phantasmic beauty beyond real time."