There is no architect in this world whose life story and work are so out of the norm and so exceptional as the 1995 Pritzker Prize winner Mr. Tadao Ando. Born in 1941 and raised by his great grandmother, he became a certified boxer at age 17. On a trip to Tokyo in junior high, he was struck by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel and found his calling. While boxing professionally, he attended evening drawing classes, took interior design correspondence courses, and studied masters of modernist architecture on his own. From 1992 and on, Benesse Corporation president, Mr. Soichiro Fukutake, commissioned Ando to design art museums on the islands of Seto Inland Sea, in an effort to revive the diminishing population and worsening environment caused by the dumping of industrial wastes by major companies. Their visionary collaboration created Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, a hotel annex, and Chichu Art Museum complex, with the latter dedicated to works of Claude Monet and two contemporary artists. Starting in 2010, with Kagawa government’s partnership, Mr. Fukutake launched the first Setouchi Art Triennial. By this time, the once devasted islands had become an art destination attracting millions of domestic as well as foreign tourists.

The short films will help us appreciate the self-taught architect who continues to design museums in the Seto Inland Sea even after having five internal organs removed in 2009 and 2014 due to pancreatic cancer.

His works can are concentrated in Osaka area but are also found in S. Korea, Taiwan, US, Canada, France, Germany, China, Switzerland, Itay, and Australia.