Tadao Ando

The American Institute of Architects has granted Tadao Ando its 59th Gold Medal, the greatest honor that this veteran institution bestows each year to professionals with built work in the United States. Awarded with the Pritzker in 1995 and considered one of the points of reference of Japanese contemporary architecture, Ando began relatively late to build outside his country, though his reputation took him as visiting professor to Yale, Columbia and Harvard , and to be the subject of a monographic exhibition at the MoMA bewteen 1987-1990. After building the wooden pavilion to represent his country at the Expo 92 in Seville, he found in the North America a territory where his skill in the use of concrete and light gradually gave him more important commissions, from the small Japanese Gallery of Art in the Chicago Art Institute or the Eychaner-Lee House, in the same city, to the more recent Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth (Texas), and the venue for the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis (Missouri). The AIA has rewarded “his exceptional artistic and intellectual sensitivity to create buildings that work and inspire.”