William J. R. Curtis

In 1992, Tadao Ando completed his first US commission, a small room in the Art Institute of Chicago dedicated to a collection of Japanese screens. A year or two before that, Ando was approached by Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., and Emily Rauh Pulitzker to design a home for their art collection. By the time it was completed in 2001, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (now Pulitzer Arts Foundation) became Ando's second building in the United States (following a house in Chicago completed in 1998) and one of two cultural neighbors (the other being CAMSTL built in 2003) in St. Louis's Grand Center neighborhood. It goes without saying that a visit to one building promotes a visit to the other, particularly since they share a courtyard and an architectural aesthetic of concrete minimalism. In 2015, Ando expanded his museum, most of it below-grade and therefore not visible from the street.

When the Ando building first opened in 2001, the institution celebrated with this slim yet handsome book (slipcase and all) on the architecture and some of the artwork it houses. For the former, there's a short essay by Ando and a long one by historian William Curtis, and for the latter are brief essays by Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra on their permanent contributions: Blue Black and Joe, respectively. Anchoring the whole is Curtis's essay, which delves into Ando's architecture generally as well as the relationship between his Pulitzer building and the site-specific artworks by Kelly and Serra. Although now accompanied by other artworks and temporary exhibitions in the expansion, these two pieces are still highlights in Ando's small but rewarding building.… (more)