Koshino House, 1979-1984, Ashiya (Japan)

Tadao Ando is the most protean international star architect of his generation. His productivity combined with his longevity makes him, after more than three-hundred realized works, an extremely prolific architect whose overall achievement is not easy to assess. One of the most remarkable aspects of his career is the contrast between the intimate, small scale of the somewhat isolated commissions that he has continued to accept and the monumental heroic interventions that he has projected and realized on prominent, culturally historic sites in Japan, Europe and elsewhere. Almost half-a-century has elapsed since Ando’s earliest, ‘guerilla’ houses, the very first of which was built for a friend in the Ōyodo suburb of Osaka; a house that eventually was later transformed into his studio. Rising incrementally higher on the same site it would become, over the years, a tall, largely top-lit architect’s office space lined with the books, a vertiginous space which seems to anticipate the three-storey library that he will eventually design and realize in 2001, as memorial to the famous Japanese writer and bibliophile Shiba Ryōtarō...[+]