Poet of exposed concrete, a self-taught master
A Japanese architect, a legend of contemporary architecture. Without formal architectural education, once a professional boxer, he became a master wholly by self-study and by traveling the world to study buildings in person, finally winning the Pritzker Prize. His signature is finely crafted "exposed concrete" — bare concrete walls, unadorned and silk-smooth, set with carefully admitted natural light, water, and sky, creating a calm, inward, Zen-like space. His masterpiece, the Church of the Light, cuts only a cross-shaped slit in the concrete wall, letting a cross of light shine into the dim interior — creating, by the simplest means, the most moving sacredness. He fused Japan’s traditional aesthetic of emptiness with modern materials, making architecture a vessel for contemplation.
In Ando’s Church of the Light there is no lavish ornament, no stained glass, only a plain wall of exposed concrete. In the wall he cut a slender cross-shaped opening, letting the light outside pierce the dim chapel — a cross made purely of light, hung in the dark. With one slit, one beam, he made a sacredness more moving than any splendor of gold. This is the power of "less."
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.