The AIA Board of Directors selected Japanese architect Tadao Ando, Hon. FAIA, to receive the 2002 AIA Gold Medal award. The highest honor the AIA confers to an individual, the Gold Medal recognizes an individual whose significant body of work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture. The Board selected Ando December 6 in Washington, D.C. He will receive the medal at the 2002 American Architectural Foundation Accent on Architecture gala Friday, March 1, 2002, in Washington, D.C.

"Thank you! I'm so happy," said Ando, when notified by AIA President John D. Anderson, FAIA, that he had won the award. Through a translator, he explained that he thinks of the AIA Gold Medal as a special honor because of his work in the United States, and considered it an especially "warm welcome."

Ando, 60, is the 59th AIA Gold Medalist, joining the ranks of such visionaries as Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, I.M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, and 2001 AIA Gold Medal recipient Michael Graves. In recognition of their legacy to architecture, the name of each Gold Medal recipient is chiseled into a granite wall of honor located in the lobby of the AIA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

"Mr. Ando's buildings embody the timelessness of all enduring architecture, but pay homage to such twentieth century icons as Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier," said David H. Watkins, FAIA, the AIA Texas regional director who nominated Ando for the award.

During Ando's 30-year professional career at the forefront of architectural design, his work has been published in 12 monographs and featured in more than 300 professional journals, books, and catalogues. Some of his best-known projects include the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, and the Eychaner/Lee House in Chicago.

Ando's Gold Medal nomination lauded him as "that rare architect who combines artistic and intellectual sensitivity in a single individual capable of producing buildings, large and small, that both serve and inspire." He credits his success to his cultural roots in western Japan, home to some of the finest examples of traditional Japanese architecture. One of Japan's leading writers, Koji Taki, has succinctly summarized Mr. Ando's contribution to the field of architecture as that of connecting "the art of building to the art of living."

Admired and respected by colleagues all over the world, Ando has served as a visiting professor at Yale University, Columbia University, and Harvard. He currently holds the chair of Professor of Architecture at the University of Tokyo.

Ando has earned numerous awards, including virtually every award Japan can bestow for architecture and the arts as well as the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, Denmark's Carlsberg Architectural Prize, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Art and Letters, and the Gold Medal of Architecture from the French Academy of Architecture. His work has been the focus of numerous exhibits, including the critically acclaimed exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1991 and the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1992.

Copyright 2001 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved.