One of the first houses built by Japan's most famous architect, Tadao Ando, is centered around an open atrium. That sounds nice until you realize that the atrium forms the only "corridor" between each of the rooms. Fancy a hot cup of tea before bed on a rainy winter's night? You'll need an umbrella and an overcoat to get to the kitchen.

Paradoxically enough, it was this Spartan abode, built in 1976 in Osaka, that launched a career that now includes hundreds of award-winning buildings the world over — and another 30 are currently under construction. At the time, future clients admired the house for the clarity of its at-one-with-nature vision. One of them, Keizo Saji, who was then the president of beverage behemoth Suntory, was so impressed that he later asked the architect to design a museum.

In 1994, the resulting Suntory Museum, whose inverted, and truncated-cone structure sits on the Osaka harbor front, became the first of many major art museums Ando has completed. Recently, too, his Benesse House Museum on Naoshima Island in the Seto Inland Sea was named by Conde Naste Traveler magazine among the new "seven wonders" of the world. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, in Texas, and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, Missouri, are just some of the other art museums completed by the 67-year-old architect, who proudly explains that he received no formal education in architecture, but taught himself through copious reading and travel.