Tadao Ando has not joined FLAPSS and has not endorsed it. This page is a reference record assembled from published interviews and public remarks. Every answer below is a direct quotation with the source and date shown next to it.
Architect; Pritzker Prize laureate, 1995
Japan · b. 1941
Japanese architect, self-taught, known for buildings in reinforced concrete including the Church of the Light, the Row House in Sumiyoshi and the Chichu Art Museum. He was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1995 and donated the prize money to a foundation for children orphaned by that year's Hanshin earthquake.
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For me, making architecture is the same as thinking. For more than thirty years, I have been making architecture by going back and forth between ideals and reality, between the fictive and the substantive. My hope has been and continues to be, not only to solve realistic problems, but also to pursue the ideal by overlaying speculative imaginings.
Recorded Grand Trianon Palace, Versailles, 22 May 1995, The Hyatt Foundation / The Pritzker Architecture Prize, 22 May 1995 source
The modern architecture that I have been weaned on also espouses (clear) function, (exposed) structure, and (raw) material as principles—characteristics that tend to be accessed only from realistic or substantive dimensions. Fictionality or imagination, the other dimension, is omitted entirely. However, Vitruvius emphasized venustas, in other words attraction or beauty as a necessity along with strength and function.
Recorded Grand Trianon Palace, Versailles, 22 May 1995, The Hyatt Foundation / The Pritzker Architecture Prize, 22 May 1995 source
More than 500 children under the age of 18 lost a parent in the Hanshin Earthquake; 88 of them lost both parents and became orphans. I have proposed the establishment of a foundation in order to support the education of these children so that they can sustain their hopes for the future. To that end, I would like to contribute the hundred thousand dollar prize awarded to me today by The Hyatt Foundation towards this new foundation for these young earthquake victims.
Recorded Grand Trianon Palace, Versailles, 22 May 1995, The Hyatt Foundation / The Pritzker Architecture Prize, 22 May 1995 source
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