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About the artwork
The new Pinault Contemporary Art Center at the Punta della Dogana opened on June 6th 2009, after it engaged Tadao Ando to renovate the unused, 37,000-square-foot customs house. It is one of the most prominent places in Venice, the merging point of the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal meters away from the memorial church of Santa Maria della Salute. The Japanese architect also said, when presenting the project in 2007: "This building has been floating on the water since the 15th century, and my intention is to see it float into the future; it is a very old building and it was very difficult to study its history so as to preserve its original structure and innovate toward the future. I will use a 20th century material, reinforced concrete, fitting it into this 15th century structure..."
About the artist
Tadao Ando is a Japanese self-taught architect, known for his distinctive approach to architecture and landscape. Ando was born in 1941 in Minato-ku, Osaka, Japan, and raised in Asahi-ku in the city. He led an eventful life, working as a truck driver and boxer prior to settling on the profession of architecture, despite never having taken formal training in the field. Struck by the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Imperial Hotel on a trip to Tokyo as a second-year high-school student, he eventually decided to end his boxing career of less than two years after graduating from high school to pursue architecture. He attended night classes to learn drawing and took correspondence courses on interior design. He visited buildings designed by renowned architects like Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn before returning to Osaka in 1968 to establish his own design studio, Tadao Ando Architect and Associates.
His style is characterized by the tradition of anti-seismic reinforced-concrete, or the use of unfinished reinforced concrete structures. World-renowned, Ando has lectured at various American universities, including Yale, Columbia and Harvard.
In 1984, Ando published his first lithograph printing of his architectural masterpieces in ink and colour pencil. In 1998, he made his representative work, "Tadao Ando Prints 1998" that consisted of ten prints.