Fort Worth, Texas ? Tadao Ando was born in 1941 in Osaka, Japan, a cultural backwater that is to Tokyo what Buffalo is to New York City. As he told Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth curator Michael Auping, living on the fringe, relying on rumor rather than firsthand knowledge, only intensified his desire to make a mark.

“Osaka is the last place someone would think of as cultural in the sense of fine modern art,” he said. “By being born in 1941, when the Pacific War opened, and being raised in this peripheral place, I think I carry this unconscious scar or need to be deeply cultural. I wanted to affect culture, even if I was not born to it.”

Having no money for architecture school, he learned his craft in the dirt and noise of the construction site, among builders and craftsmen who turned out everything from ship models to teahouses. He haunted Osaka’s temples and shrines, gathering information about traditional Japanese architecture, and studied obsessively, at one point tracing Le Corbusier’s early drawings to develop his own sense of form and line. He also apprenticed to various architects but could never hold a job because of his “stubbornness and bad temper.”

The sum of these early experiences was the intuitive understanding of building and craft that grounds his mature work. He is a maker and a refiner, much more akin to Renzo Piano, architect of the Nasher Sculpture Center, than, say, to Rem Koolhaas, who thrives on theory and the romance of the new.

Ando’s first projects were row houses in Osaka – simple, stolid concrete boxes with small courtyards that serve as sanctuaries from urban chaos. Instead of engaging the city, they fend it off. The lessons of these early projects show up again and again in later work, including the parallel pavilions of the new Modern.

The Church of the Light in Osaka, for example, is another spare concrete box with a monumental cross cut into the end wall. In the Church on the Water in Hokaido, the end wall becomes a window that looks out on a reflecting pool with a cross in the center and a pine forest in the background. The transition from that image to the sculpture garden and reflecting pool of the Modern is easy, provided you substitute a Lobster Rodeo billboard for a cross.

“At a time when the computer has become so important, a community needs a central gathering place,” Ando said recently in Fort Worth. “I like to think of this museum as being the heart and spirit of Fort Worth, like a church or chapel.”