Tadao Ando

Fujiko Nakaya’s Cloud #07156 is the first work in the Bourse de Commerce installations sequence to delete Tadao Ando’s concrete rotunda instead of standing inside it. The 93-year-old Sapporo-born artist switched on her high-pressure pump nebulization system inside the Pinault Collection’s Parisian rotunda on 4 June 2026; the fog runs through 14 September 2026 as the centrepiece of the Clair-obscur programme at the Bourse de Commerce. Every other rotunda commission since 22 May 2021 — Urs Fischer’s burning wax Sabines, Anri Sala’s nocturnal sound piece, Danh Vo’s Before the Storm, Philippe Parreno’s permanent Medici-column light sequence — has answered Ando’s 29-metre-wide concrete cylinder by occupying it. Nakaya answers it by erasing it. ...

Tadao Ando spent fifteen years turning three of François Pinault’s historic shells — a Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal, a seventeenth-century Dorsoduro customs house and an eighteenth-century Parisian wheat exchange — into the same room. The Tadao Ando Pinault Collection lineage runs from April 2006 to May 2021 and resolves, in all three cases, to a single architectural move: a free-standing concrete volume inside preserved masonry, with light arriving only where Ando lets it. Palazzo Grassi was the rehearsal, Punta della Dogana the proof, and the Bourse de Commerce the closing argument. ...

Toshiko Mori is the first woman to receive the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Architecture — and her 17 April 2026 award places a Japanese-American architect in the same US institutional canon Tadao Ando entered in 2002. The Toshiko Mori Gold Medal is not a career capstone delivered late; it is a re-positioning. The Academy, founded in 1898, rotates its Gold Medals among artistic disciplines, so architecture recognition is irregular — which is what makes the 2026 cycle load-bearing. It arrives in the same year Shigeru Ban takes the AIA Gold Medal, the same year Junya Ishigami opens his pavilion on the Vitra Campus, and the same year Peter Zumthor’s David Geffen Galleries open at LACMA. Read together, these four events redraw the map of what Japanese architecture in the West actually means. ...