Tadao Ando: Living with Light

This book showcases recent houses by the world-renowned Japanese minimalist architect, offering unprecedented access to his thought process through more than 100 photographs, line drawings, sketches, and plans.

Tadao Ando is one of the best-known and most influential contemporary architects with a minimalistic aesthetic and love of natural materials like glass and concrete -- proof that less is more. This volume features ten houses and examines his approach to these designs. Viewed as a collection, these houses serve to demonstrate the wide range of Ando's prodigious genius through lavish and striking photographs. Characteristics of his work include large expanses of unadorned architectural concrete walls combined with wooden or stone floors and large windows. He uses simple methods to solve complicated and small spaces and turns them into spaces with breathtaking landscapes.

With precise and beautiful photographs accompanied by Tadao Ando's sketches, drawings, and plans, this volume presents several unseen and little published works, from the Bosco Studio and House facing the Pacific Ocean in Oaxaca, Mexico (2014)to a penthouse in Manhattan for a Japanese collector, completed in 2019.

About the Author:

Philip Jodidio studied art history and economics at Harvard before moving to Paris, where he was editor-in-chief of the French art monthly Connaissance des Arts from 1980 to 2002. Jodidio has written more than 100 books about contemporary architecture and art.
Born in Osaka, Japan, Tadao Ando is one of the most renowned contemporary Japanese architects. In 1969 he established Tadao Ando Architect & Associates. Among the many awards Ando has received are the Pritzker Prize and the Kyoto Prize. Ando has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.