Fumihiko Maki, architect who tapped power of simplicity, dies at 95 (2024)

Mr. Maki was described frequently as a melder of Japanese and Western styles over his more than 60-year career. His cross-cultural “juxtaposing” was noted in 1993 when he won the top honor of his profession, the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Mr. Maki never publicly quibbled with that portrayal. His influences, he noted, were part of a global mélange that included the light and shadows of Mediterranean villages and the gleaming hulls and superstructures of the ships he watched in Yokohama Port as a boy.

Yet when asked to explain his architectural vision, Mr. Maki rarely brought up the fusion of East-West styles or the materials he used in more than 30 major projects around the world. He instead liked to discuss concepts. One of the most important, he said, was the challenge of sensing the “body of wisdom,” or collective memory, from a site and translating that into a design.

In the Netherlands, forever swept by wind, his Floating Pavilion (1996) performance venue in Groningen is covered by a white roof that resembles sheets rippled by the breeze. In Manhattan, rising from the ruins of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the windows of the angular 4 World Trade Center reflect the surrounding cityscape and Hudson River. In the soaring lobby, polished black granite walls look out on the adjacent 9/11 Memorial.

Mr. Maki said the tower, opened in 2013, was meant to symbolize rebirth and stand “quiet with dignity” next to the memorial site.

“With its delicate silhouette and obsessively minimalist detailing — each pane of glass is exactly one floor high, giving the exterior of the building a grid-like simplicity — the tower aims to complement rather than overshadow the rest of the ground-zero construction,” wrote Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne.

As the tower was being constructed, Mr. Maki was often asked to recount his experiences as a teenager during World War II and the reconstruction of Japan. (In 2007, an arts center he designed opened about 35 miles east of Hiroshima, site of the first U.S. atomic bombing.)

His boyhood ambition was to become an aeronautical engineer, he said. The postwar restrictions during the American occupation of Japan, however, closed that path. “Since I was interested in making, building, and designing things,” he said in a 2018 interview with the architecture site ArchNewsNow, “I thought that the closest thing to that would be architecture.”

His first commission came while in the United States to study and later teach. In the late 1950s, while an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, he was asked to sketch ideas for a new museum. Philanthropist Etta Eiseman Steinberg saw Mr. Maki’s designs — walls of glass, high ceilings — and pushed for him to lead the project for Steinberg Hall (1960), named after her late husband, Mark Steinberg, who headed a St. Louis brokerage house.

That would be Mr. Maki’s only building in the United States for more than 30 years.

In the mid-1960s, after returning to Japan, he became associated with young Japanese architects known as the Metabolists, a futurist movement whose ideas included incorporating prefab materials and industrial-style layouts to squeeze the most efficiency from urban design. Mr. Maki eventually drifted away on his own path.

But some of the Metabolist ethos took root — such as the belief that architecture should reflect a changing world. At the same time, he held tight to the Japanese idea of “oku,” roughly meaning a sense of proportion and function even in cramped spaces.

He called it a feeling of “inner depth” in a building. “I believe an understanding of this way of perceiving space is important in formulating ideas of what future cities should be like,” he wrote in his 2008 collection of essays, “Nurturing Dreams.”

He returned to Japan and became one of the leading modernists, with commissions including Tokyo’s Hillside Terrace Complex, a series of cube-like residential, office and retail structures. A first phase was finished in the 1960s, and the project was further developed until the 1990s.

With the Fujisawa Gymnasium (1984), Mr. Maki added what became one of his signature elements: a curved roof that seems to float over the interior. The roof line “suggests both an ancient warrior helmet and a hovering spaceship,” architecture journalist Julie V. Iovine wrote in the New York Times in 2004. A similar design was used for the new Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium complex completed in 1990.

The use of seemingly floating forms, undulating roofs and sharp-angled contours was explored by Mr. Maki in projects as varied as the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto (1986), a crematorium (1997) on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu and a public restroom in a Tokyo park (2020).

“I continued to ask myself what the essential nature of modernity was,” he wrote.

He returned to projects in the United States in the 1990s, completing the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 1993. His extension of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab — a complex enveloped by glass and steel around central courtyards — opened in 2009 alongside the original lab building designed in the 1980s by I.M. Pei.

When pressed, Mr. Maki called himself a modernist. He also made it clear he felt any categorization was limiting. “I don’t use single words to describe my architecture,” Mr. Maki once said. “Let’s just say, to create a humane environment through each project is my primary goal.”

Fumihiko Maki was born in Tokyo on Sept. 6, 1928, into a lineage rooted in Japan’s privileged class. His father was a banker; his mother was a homemaker and part of a family that since the 17th century had run one of the country’s major construction conglomerates.

As a child, he recalled his first brush with modern design during a visit to the home of architect Kameki Tsuchiura. He said he was awed by the power of the glass and steel construction and whitewashed walls.

Mr. Maki attended the University of Tokyo before transferring to the Cranbrook Academy, an art school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where he received a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1952. He completed a master’s degree in architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in 1954.

At the time, many of the students were World War II veterans studying under the GI Bill. Mr. Maki said he rarely encountered anger or ill will to his face, saying he always appreciated the “largehearted character of America” during that era.

After leaving Harvard, he worked at architectural firms and then served as assistant professor in design at Washington University from 1956 to 1962. He returned to teach at Harvard until 1965 before returning to Tokyo to open his architecture studio.

His Wacoal Arts Center in Tokyo, known as the Spiral for its corkscrew staircase and exterior resembling steps, became a landmark site for his use of fragmented geometric spaces and forms in a dense cityscape.

In Toronto, he designed a white granite museum for the Aga Khan Foundation (2014). Four years later in London, he completed the Aga Khan Centre.

He became the second Japanese architect to win the Pritzker. His mentor, Kenzo Tange, received the honor in 1987. (In 2004, Mr. Maki beat out other Pritzker winners with his design for a new tower in the U.N. complex in Manhattan, but the project was delayed and never built.) Mr. Maki’s other awards include the AIA Gold Medal in 2011 from the American Institute of Architects.

In 1960, Mr. Maki married Misao Matsumoto, a graduate of Vassar College. They had two daughters and three grandchildren. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. Maki said that the true test of any building is not the artfulness of design but whether it serves the needs of the people who use it. A beautiful failure, he said, is still a failure.

“I think architecture is not like art. It must be used,” he said. “So, if any, it is a kind of social art. For me architecture is an endless process for learning.”