Tadao Ando

Self-taught — he was a boxer and truck driver before he was an architect. He studied by reading Le Corbusier's *Œuvre Complète* and travelling Europe, Africa, and the US to see the buildings in person.

Row House Sumiyoshi (Osaka, 1976) put him on the map. The Church of the Light (1989), the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2002), Punta della Dogana (Venice, 2009), Hill of the Buddha (Sapporo, 2016).

Smooth poured-in-place concrete, sharp geometry, calibrated openings that frame light as material. He uses the same six-millimetre tie-rod hole pattern across his career as a kind of signature.

Pritzker laureate 1995. Donates the prize money to UNICEF and post-disaster reconstruction.