Tadao Ando

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future.

For me, making architecture is the same as thinking. For more than thirty years, I have been making architecture by going back and forth between ideals and reality, between the fictive and the substantive. My hope has been and continues to be, not only to solve realistic problems, but also to pursue the ideal by overlaying speculative imaginings.

The modern architecture that I have been weaned on also espouses (clear) function, (exposed) structure, and (raw) material as principles—characteristics that tend to be accessed only from realistic or substantive dimensions. Fictionality or imagination, the other dimension, is omitted entirely. However, Vitruvius emphasized venustas, in other words attraction or beauty as a necessity along with strength and function.

More than 500 children under the age of 18 lost a parent in the Hanshin Earthquake; 88 of them lost both parents and became orphans. I have proposed the establishment of a foundation in order to support the education of these children so that they can sustain their hopes for the future. To that end, I would like to contribute the hundred thousand dollar prize awarded to me today by The Hyatt Foundation towards this new foundation for these young earthquake victims.