Tadao Ando’s Kansai in four buildings

This children’s library is one of the clearest expressions of the philanthropic instincts behind some of Ando’s work. Opened in summer 2020, it’s home to around 20,000 books, was designed by Ando and donated by him to the city of Osaka.

Situated on Nakanoshima island in the heart of the city, the building itself acts as a gentle counterpoint to its surroundings: a low concrete arc curving against the bend of the meandering rivers, its eastern half solid and sheltered, its western half opening onto a generous riverside terrace.

Inside, three storeys of floor-to-ceiling bookcases wrap around a central atrium, organised into loose themes intended to let children’s curiosity guide them. The books can be freely taken and read anywhere within the building, including to a cylindrical reading room with a moonlike skylight where projection-mapped pictures bring books to life.

The Book Forest is one gift among many on Nakanoshima, and there’s little need to leave the island to fill a day.

There’s the serene Nakanoshima Park, Osaka’s first public park, which rolls east for 1.5km from the library along the water. It’s home to several riverside restaurants and a beautiful rose garden which bursts into colour twice a year, once in May and again in October.

Next door to the library, the red-brick, Neo-Renaissance Osaka City Central Public Hall hosts concerts, operas and exhibitions, as well as other events and festivals in the square out front throughout the year, and is a great bet if you’re looking for something to do.

Further west, the National Museum of Art, Osaka holds thousands of traditional and contemporary works from Japan and further afield, while the neighbouring Osaka Science Museum boasts hands-on exhibits and one of Japan’s largest planetariums.

Off the island, the Aqualiner river cruise departs from Yodoyabashi pier, just minutes from the library, and loops around Nakanoshima and past Osaka Castle in around an hour. Along the way it passes one of the world’s longest cherry blossom promenades, an Ando initiative that involved adding 3,000 trees to the city’s existing Japan Mint cherry passage.

VS. is the newest of Ando’s Osaka builds. Opened in September 2024 inside Umekita Park, it marks the architect’s most direct contribution to a wider redevelopment he has been helping shape since the early 2000s.

Under Ando’s architectural supervision, the building was conceived as a stage for dialogue between art forms, futuristic technology and traditional craft. Since the ‘Tadao Ando: Youth’ exhibition launched its programming in March 2025, VS. has rotated through art and music shows with an emphasis on immersive, interactive work that makes full use of the expansive and versatile space.

Most of its 1,400 square metres is underground but above there are two overlapping cubes, the upper half of a 15-metre-ceilinged main studio and a glass-walled entrance pavilion, both of which are being slowly cloaked in ivy.

Sinking the building serves the wider park: Umekita is intended to be Osaka’s new green lung, returning greenery to a city that had Japan’s lowest per-capita share of it, all on a site that spent much of its recent life as a freight yard. The North Park around VS., due for completion in spring 2027, will include the 0.9-hectare Umekita Forest, an urban woodland of 165 native trees, opening to the public for the first time this November.

The location of VS. puts you right in the middle of the hub that is very Umeda, yet within walking distance of quieter pockets of the city that recall the Osaka Ando would have grown up in.

The surrounding Umekita Park spans 45,000 square metres of lawn, water features and walking paths and is home to numerous sculptures and artworks as well as a sweeping 120-metre canopy that both shades a part of it and makes for an obvious event space.

A few minutes’ away, Time Out Market Osaka gathers more than a dozen of the city’s best kitchens and bars under one roof. Chef collaborations and exclusive dishes sit alongside highly slurpable udon and other Osaka classics, with a stage hosting family-friendly programming year-round.

Fifteen minutes west, the Umeda Sky Building lifts you to the Kuchu Teien Observatory across a glass escalator suspended in open air, with sweeping views across the city and over Osaka Bay.

A short walk north, Nakatsu feels a half-century older than Umeda’s glass towers. A retro shopping street winds between traditional, low-slung houses, indie cafés, vintage boutiques and standing bars.

As the place where he began his architectural apprenticeship, Ando considers Kobe his second home. The Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art is a great example of how he chose to give back to Osaka’s neighbour.

Opened in 2002, the museum was conceived as a symbol of cultural recovery from the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, with Ando winning the international competition to design it.

The whole museum was designed as a work of art that shifts in character with the hour and the season. Outside, a white granite platform anchors three parallel concrete volumes wrapped in glass, presenting an opaque face to the city and opening onto Osaka Bay.

Inside, that plain shell gives way to a maze of light and shadow: a calm entrance hall, glass corridors drenched in changing daylight, and a spiral ‘circular terrace’ staircase that connects it all together.

The architecture culminates on the third-floor Sea Deck, where Ando’s monumental Green Apple – a recurring motif nodding to Samuel Ullman’s poem Youth that he lives by – keeps watch over the water. Added in 2019, the Ando Gallery is a free-to-enter extension he designed and funded himself to put his sketches, models and writings within reach of anyone. It includes a small library housing Ando’s writings and a selection of books on architecture.

HAT Kobe, the wider waterfront development around the museum, encompasses parks, research institutes and cultural venues and is a central part of the city that Ando also helped to shape.

Next door to the museum, the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution offers a serious-minded but accessible memorial to the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, with displays ranging from raw archival footage to interactive recovery exhibits.

Hugging the museum on the other side, Nagisa Park is a free waterfront promenade joining the Harbor Walk with views of bustling Sannomiya in the distance. The park is dotted with public art, including Kenji Yanobe’s six-metre silver Sun Sister, and marks the seaward end of Museum Road, a 1.2-kilometre sculpture-lined route that climbs north toward Kobe Oji Zoo. Along it you can also find the BB Plaza Museum of Art Iwaya, a small but well-curated modern art space.

Inland there’s the historic Nada sake district, where the Hakutsuru Sake Brewery Museum walks visitors through a life-size recreation of how the area’s famous sake is made. It’s free to enter and offers tastings at the end.