Self-Taught Tadao Ando Wins the 1995 Pritzker Prize : Architecture: Honored for combining ‘artistic and intellectual sensitivity,’ he will be given a $100,000 grant on May 22 in Versailles.

Tadao Ando, a self-taught Japanese architect known for artistically composed buildings that function efficiently and delight the senses, is the winner of the 1995 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The annual award, known as the Nobel of architecture, comes with a $100,000 grant and a medal, to be presented to Ando on May 22 at the Grand Trianon Palace in Versailles, France.

In announcing the honor, the Pritzker jury praised Ando as “that rare architect who combines artistic and intellectual sensitivity” in “buildings, both large and small, that serve and inspire.”

“I’m very excited about this architect,” said J. Carter Brown, jury chair and director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. “His work has a poetry to it that distinguishes it. He is sensitive to light, and he has a sixth sense about space. He also has a particular gift for designing architecture in sequence, incorporating landscape and views that you experience over time, as you pass through his buildings.”

Ando, 53, has produced an extraordinary body of work at an age when most architects are only beginning to get major commissions, according to the jury citation. Working primarily in Japan, he combines principles of international Modernism with Japanese aesthetic traditions.

His buildings, often constructed of silky-smooth concrete, are distinguished by dynamic combinations of materials, consummate craftsmanship and surprising spaces. “There is never a predictable moment as one moves through his buildings. . . . Originality is his medium and his personal view of the world is his source of inspiration,” the citation said.

Ando, who lives and works in Osaka, Japan, responded with a printed statement saying he is “bewildered by the news,” but that he now has a heightened sense of responsibility to create buildings that “embrace humanity with enduring care and love.”

Lacking both an architectural degree and training with a master architect, Ando attributes his achievement to self-directed study of buildings in Europe and the United States. He first gained attention, in 1975, for a small house designed as part of a row of dwellings in Osaka. Perhaps best known internationally for the Japan Pavilion at Expo ’92 in Sevilla, Spain, he has designed single-family dwellings, housing projects, museums, office buildings, a church, a food-processing facility and a department store.

Among his residential projects is Rokko Housing, a complex of 70 units--each with a unique interior--located on a hillside with a panoramic view of Osaka Bay. Rokko Housing, which won Japan’s Cultural Design Prize in 1983, is one of several Ando buildings in the vicinity of Kobe--all of which survived the Jan. 17 earthquake.

None of his work has been built in the United States, but Ando has served as a visiting professor at Yale, Harvard and Columbia universities. New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged an exhibition of his work in 1991.

The Pritzker Architecture Prize was established in 1979 by the Hyatt Foundation to honor a living architect whose work has made “consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.”

Jury members include Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat, from Torino, Italy; architect Charles Correa, of Bombay; Frank Gehry, the L.A.-based architect who won the Pritzker in 1989; New York-based critic and author Ada Louise Huxtable, and Toshio Nakamura, editor-in-chief of A+U architectural publications of Tokyo.

Ando is the 18th Pritzker award winner and the third Japanese architect to receive the international honor. Kenzo Tange won the award in 1987, and Fumihiko Maki was the Pritzker laureate in 1993.