Beginnings
Fumihiko Maki was born in Tokyo in 1928. By 1952, he had graduated with a degree in Architecture from the University of Tokyo. He moved to the United States to attend the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. It was here that he was greatly influenced by Eliel Saarinen. He then enrolled at Harvard University to attend their Graduate School of Design. He earned a master of architecture degree. Maki did his first apprenticeships with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in New York, and then with Sert Jackson and Associates in Cambridge.
From 1956 to 1963, Maki worked as an associate professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. While there, he co-founded the Master of Urban Design Program and published "Investigations in Collective Form." He also received his first design commission while at the University, for the Steinberg Hall on campus. In 1963, he took a faculty post at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.
Professional Accomplishments
In 1965, Maki returned to Japan and established his own architectural firm, Maki and Associates. He located it in Tokyo. In the years since, his staff has grown to 35, with an equal amount having spent time there and then going on to begin their own firms.
Maki admits that he was influenced by post-Bauhaus internationalism as a student. Ten years of working and studying in the U.S. has given him a distance from both Japan and America and other parts of the world. He attributes his aesthetic sense to this experience. Maki considers himself a modernist. His materials of choice are glass, metal, and poured concrete, although he has been known to use mosaic tile, stainless steel and anodized aluminum as well. He is interested in new technologies, and designs many of his buildings using modular systems. In his designing, Maki makes a concerted effort to capture the spirit of a place and era. His goal is to create an "unforgettable scene" to accommodate and complement the humans who use the space. This is his inspiration when beginning any design. He has successfully fused both Western and Eastern cultures in his architectural designs.
In the 1960s, he was a founding member of the Metabolists, and his name has been permanently linked with the large-scale urban designs associated with this school of architectural thought. Their view was to show changeability and flexibility as key elements in their designs. It was important to never design in isolation from the structure of the city as a whole. Instead of the modernist megastructures (a term that he coined) that popped up all over the world, Maki showed how a huge building could still possess qualities the megastructures were designed without. Maki's largest buildings are still scaled appropriately to feel warm and exciting to people. He utilizes light almost like a painter… making it a tangible part of each building. He tries to make translucency, transparency and opacity exist in harmony. "Detailing is what gives architecture its rhythm and scale," Maki says.
Maki says, "There is no more critically concerned observer of our rapidly changing society than the urban designer. Charged with giving form – with perceiving and contributing order – to agglomerates of buildings, highways, and green spaces in which men have increasingly come to work and live, the urban designer stands between technology and human need and seeks to make the first a servant, for the second must be paramount in a civilized world."
Fumihiko Maki was chosen to be the 1993 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. He is the second Japanese architect to be honored with this title. The first, Kenzo Tange, was one of the professors Maki studied with at the University of Tokyo.
Buildings Designed by Maki
Maki has designed buildings all over the world. Several projects in Japan include the National Museum of Art in Kyoto, the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, The Nippon Convention Center in Chiba, the Tepia Science Pavilion in Tokyo, and the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus. Other projects worldwide include the Yerba Buena Gardens Visual Arts Center in San Francisco, the Ensemble Global Gate in Dusseldorf, the Republic Polytechnic in Singapore and the Mildred lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, among many others. His works in progress currently include the Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat in Ottawa, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, a new building for the United Nations in New York City, the Taipei Main Station of the Taoyuan International Airport Access MRT System in Taipei and Tower 4 of the new World Trade Center in New York City.
Conclusion
Fumihiko Maki has had a major impact on the world's architecture. His fusion of East and West, of modernism and beauty has graced some of the largest cities in the world. Maki's influence will live on in his work, his students, and his architectural legacy.
