The Noguchi Museum has named architect Tadao Ando and artist Elyn Zimmerman recipients of the 2016 Isamu Noguchi Award. The award, given annually since 2014, recognizes practitioners who “share Noguchi’s spirit of innovation, global consciousness, and East-West exchange.”
The awards will be presented during the Noguchi Museum’s Spring Benefit in May.
Like Noguchi, Ando incorporates natural elements into his designs, and shapes space with humble materials like concrete. Among many notable commissions, his Osaka-baed practice, Tadao Ando Architects & Associates, designed the Pulitzer Arts Foundation building in St. Louis, Missouri (2001), the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2002), and the Punta Della Dogana Contemporary Art Center, Venice (2009). Ando received the Pritzker Prize in 1995.
Zimmerman is known for her site-specific stone installations that play on water and light. Her public commissions include the Sculpture Garden at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama (1993), a pool and granite sculpture, for the National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. (1980), as well as Suspended Arcs, a commission for the Beijing Olympics (2008).
In 2015, the award was granted to industrial designer Jasper Morrison and architect Yoshio Taniguchi. Norman Foster and artist Hiroshi Sugimoto claimed the honor in its inaugural year.