This article originally appeared in the December 2014 issue of ELLE DECOR. For more stories from our archive, subscribe to ELLE DECOR All Access.Hollywood should make a movie about Tadao Ando's life: The poor boy from Osaka, Japan, who was separated from his twin brother as a child, who spent his youth as a carpenter's apprentice, who became a professional boxer only to hang up his gloves and teach himself how to be an architect using books and careful observation. Despite his total lack of formal training, in 1995, Ando won his discipline's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize (and donated his $100,000 in prize money to the victims of the Kobe earthquake that same year). Since then, his international fame has sharply risen. He has designed everything from Tom Ford's horse ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico, to a children's hospital in Nepal to a winery in Provence. The billionaire Franois Pinaultafter hiring Ando to expand his Palazzo Grassi in Venicehas now charged the architect with building another lavish museum in Paris. The design calls for a massive concrete cylinder to be placed in the city's former stock exchange, the Bourse de Paris.Yasushi NagaiArchitect Tadao Ando was tasked with creating a spacious home within a limited building area in Moto-Azabu, Tokyo. The result is a dramatic, angular structure with an exterior of exposed concrete. Ando's choice of material is typicalconcrete for him is what marble was for Michelangelo. Limiting himself to concrete and natural light, Ando, 76, creates spaces that possess an almost sacred mix of the austere and the sublime. His latest commissiona four-story house for a Tokyo art collector in the hilly, exclusive residential neighborhood of Moto-Azabushows the autodidact at the height of his powers.As with most Ando projects, the plan has a subtly complex geometry: two overlapping L-shaped walls. The first traces the southwestern boundary of the site. A second interior wall mirrors the first but is slightly angled, creating little nooks illuminated by shafts of natural light that show off the owner's enviable collection of furniture by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouv. Beyond its beauty, what is most striking about the space is how consistent it feels with many of Ando's earliest projects. "I believe my philosophy in architecture has not changed very much over the years," he says. "I have always sought to restrict the material palette of architecture and pursue geometric configurations in plan."Yasushi NagaiThe cocktail table, stool, and chair, all by Charlotte Perriand, make up most of a seating area at the top of the stairway. The railing is steel plate, and the door, console, and flooring are all oak. Ando opened his practice in 1969 and rose to prominence with a radical rowhouse he built in 1976 in the downtown Osaka neighborhood of Sumiyoshi. That windowless concrete structure looks almost like a modernist mausoleum from the street. The facade is a tall, unadorned wall with a narrow rectangular portal, but within, it is an urban refuge.While more lavish by comparison, the house in Moto-Azabu exhibits many of the same features as Ando's first house. Most obviously, one sees the same virtuosic use of reinforced concrete. The process Ando uses to make concrete is by now famous: He collaborates with master craftsmen and employs varnished wood molds to cast his blocks and give them their silky finish. He then aligns the seams and joints with fanatical precision. Some architects conceal the "tie holes"the circular markings left over from bolts that hold the concrete blocks together when they are castbut Ando celebrates them, leaving them exposed and lining them up to emphasize the abstract geometries of his spaces."My philosophy in architecture has not changed very much over the years"Ando is often compared to his hero, Le Corbusier. As a kid in Osaka, he found a monograph on the Swiss architect in a secondhand bookshop and was immediately struck by the images. Once he saved up enough money to buy the book, he traced Corbusier's buildings so often that "the pages turned black," he told the Pritzker committee. Despite his strong kinship with Corbusier, Ando's true architectural soulmate may be Louis Kahn, who had the same taste for monoliths and the same fetish for concrete and natural light.See Inside This Artful Exposed Concrete HouseAs Ando's stock continues to rise, some of his projects are now giving off the slightest whiff of commercialism. His new residential building in New York, at 152 Elizabeth Street in the Nolita neighborhoodthe first full-scale Ando project in that cityis a rather anodyne fusion of glass and concrete, not immediately distinguishable from other high-priced Manhattan condos.Ando maintains that, with his buildingsand perhaps with boxingsize rarely matters. "The strength of architecture does not depend on the scale of the building or the size of the program, but rather the process before the birth of a structure," he explains. But he can't deny that there is something special about building a home for someone, as he has done so transcendently with this new project in Moto-Azabu: "Houses facilitate the needs and activities of everyday life. This fulfills the highest potential of architecture."