Tadao Ando

Japanese architect Tadao Ando, a self-taught former boxer who won the 1995 Pritzker Prize, creates spare, meditative spaces from raw concrete that harness natural light as a primary material. His Church of the Light in Osaka (1989) — a simple concrete box with a cross-shaped slit in the wall flooding the altar with light — is among the most spiritually affecting buildings of the 20th century.