Fumihiko Maki speaks with architecture students in 2006 outside the Kemper Art Museum.
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2024-06-13 • Liam Otten
Remembering Fumihiko Maki
2024-06-13 • Liam Otten
Steinberg Hall, designed by Fumihiko Maki. Photo: David Kilper
Celebrated architect Fumihiko Maki, a Pritzker Prize winner who served on the architecture faculty at Washington University in St. Louis from 1956-62, and who designed three campus buildings, died at his home in Tokyo Thursday, June 6. He was 95.
Maki created dozens of buildings around the world, beginning with WashU’s Steinberg Hall, which was dedicated in 1960. Major projects range from the Hillside Terrace mixed-use housing complex (1969-92) and the Spiral Building (1985) in Tokyo, to the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto (2014) and the 72-story Tower 4 (2013) at the former World Trade Center site. Two additional campus buildings, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and Earl E. and Myrtle E. Walker Hall, opened at WashU in 2006.
“Mr. Maki’s impact on our school has been remarkable,” said Carmon Colangelo, the Ralph J. Nagel Dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. “His extraordinary achievements as an architect began here in St. Louis with Steinberg Hall. We continue to be inspired by his contributions to our campus and the world and are proud to be stewards of his legacy.”
Generating Form
Born in Tokyo in 1928, Maki earned a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Tokyo in 1952. He spent the next year at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, then enrolled at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, earning a Master of Architecture degree in 1954.
At WashU, as an associate professor of architecture, Maki co-founded, with Roger Montgomery, the Master of Urban Design Program. He also won the commission for Steinberg Hall, which originally housed the WashU Gallery of Art, the Art & Architecture Library and the Department of Art History and Archaeology in Arts & Sciences. Maki’s design was notable for its inventive, folded-plate concrete structure and for its relationship, at once dynamic and comfortable, with two neighboring neoclassical structures, Bixby and Givens Halls.
During this same period, as a founding member of the Metabolism movement, Maki helped to pioneer a distinctively Japanese modernist idiom. For the Metabolists, the growth of buildings and cities was a fundamentally organic process, analogous to tree branches and leaves sprouting from a central trunk, with both large permanent elements and elements that would continuously grow and change. This stood in marked contrast to the megastructures and large-scale isolated urban projects that had come to dominate post-World War II planning.
In his book “Investigations in Collective Form,” which WashU published in 1964 and reissued in 2004, Maki set forth his conception of “group form,” which further emphasized architecture’s social and sequential aspects, and which drew inspiration from the spatial massing of traditional towns and villages.
“There exists unquestionably a clear structural relationship between the village and the houses, between village activities and individual family life, or between the movement of villagers and cows,” Maki wrote. “Here the house unit is a generator of the village form, and vice versa. A unit can be added without changing the basic structure of the village.”
Maki & Associates
Maki returned to Tokyo in 1965 to open his own architectural practice, Maki & Associates. Over the next several decades, he would design the Tepia Science Pavilion in Tokyo (1989), the Nippon Convention Center in Chiba (1989), the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium (1990) and the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus (1994), among many others. Tokyo’s Hillside Terrace apartment complex, which Maki designed beginning in 1969, was completed in six stages over a period of 23 years.
In 1981, Maki returned to WashU to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Givens Hall, the College of Architecture’s longtime home, and later served as the Ruth and Norman Moore Guest Visitor in Architecture. In 1987, Maki was awarded an honorary doctorate of art and architecture. An annual guest lectureship is named in his honor.
Steinberg Hall remained Maki’s only completed building in the United States until 1993, with the opening of his Yerba Buena Gardens Visual Arts Center in San Francisco. That same year, Maki was awarded the Pritzker Prize, generally considered architecture’s highest honor. He has since designed other major campus buildings, including the MIT Media Lab and the Annenberg Public Policy Center at Penn (both 2009).
“He uses light in a masterful way making it as tangible a part of every design as are the walls and roof,” wrote the Pritzker selection jury. “In each building, he searches for a way to make transparency, translucency and opacity exist in total harmony. He uses detail to give his structures rhythm and scale.“
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and Walker Hall, both designed by Fumihiko Maki. Photo: Stephanie Schlaifer / Washington University.
Design Attention
At WashU, the Kemper Art Museum and Walker Hall, both situated immediately north of Steinberg Hall, helped to consolidate the Sam Fox School, which the university had established the year before. The museum, in addition to housing the university’s renowned art collection, includes the Kenneth and Nancy Kranzberg Art & Architecture Library and the Department of Art History and Archaeology. Walker Hall houses graduate and undergraduate studios, classrooms and production facilities.
“Instead of expressive architectural gestures or contextual exterior imagery, Maki finds the components of his architecture in careful design attention to basic elements such as walls, floors, vertical shafts, cellular volumes, and pedestrian links, organized primarily in terms of their functions,” wrote Eric Mumford, the Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture, in an essay about the Kemper Art Museum.
“It’s finely finished, simple, rectangular internal volumes create exhibition spaces that allow the focus to remain on the artworks,” Mumford added, “making the museum a focal point for the university’s educational mission as well as a clear demonstration of Maki’s urban design concepts of campus planning.”
In recent years, Maki completed the Tottori Prefectural Musuem of Art (2024), the Singapore Land Tower Regeneration Project (2023), the Yokohama City Hall (2020) and London’s Aga Khan Centre (2018), among many others. A member of the Japan Institute of Architects, he was an honorary fellow of both the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Maki’s many honors, in addition to the Pritzker, include the Japan Institute of Architecture Award (1963, 1985); the Reynolds Memorial Award (1987); the UIA Gold Medal (1993); the Praemium Imperiale (1999); the AIA Gold Medal (2011); and the Japanese Art Academy Prize (2012). In 2013, he was named a Person of Cultural Merit by the Japanese government.