Fumihiko Maki, the celebrated Japanese architect, passed away on June 6, 2024. The architect was perhaps best known as a founding member of the Metabolist movement, a Japanese architectural philosophy formulated as a response to the devastation of the Second World War. Having graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1952 and then from Harvard in 1954, Maki worked for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in New York and Sert Jackson and Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts before returning to Japan and founding his own practice Maki and Associates in 1965.

In an interview with STIR in 2019, the Pritzker Prize Laureate and AIA Gold Medalist spoke of his design philosophy with a distinct Japanese understatedness, "Humanism in architecture has always been my focus and is a continuous thread running through all my projects…I have always focused on decency as a basic ethical principle, giving consideration to all users. We do our best for a given site or project, executing the client’s desires, while also meeting the hidden expectations of society. And for this reason, there has never been any peak in my career as an architect.” The architect was not only a pioneer in rebuilding Japan and redefining Japanese architecture post World War, but his work was also particularly notable for a hybrid outlook, merging Western and Eastern influences, thus underscoring the results of the adoption of modernist principles in the non-West.

In the foreword to Maki’s book of essays, Nurturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City (2008), architectural historian Eduard Sekler quoted a contemporary architect speaking about Maki, "The majority of our generation’s urban experience of the last four decades in Tokyo took place in his buildings.” Perhaps that is the legacy of the architect who called himself “a modernist, unequivocally.” While paying homage to his influence and his formidable shadow on both Japanese and global architecture, STIR attempts to decode what made the pioneer’s work definitive, while also appealing to a broad spectrum of the public body. 

On Metabolism and redefining Japanese architecture

In the chaotic 1960s, four young architects Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, Fumihiko Maki and critic Noboru Kawazoe established the tenets for what would be the Metabolist movement in Japan. The movement and philosophy responded to the urban issues the country faced in the aftermath of the war, promising change, adaptation and growth in a static society. Taking its name from a biological process, the group envisioned architecture and the fabric of Tokyo (or the city) as organically growing; as a living thing with buildings acting as cells within the overall scheme.

The buildings that were constructed as part of the movement were defined by their often brutalist forms and an embrace of technological advances in construction and materials. The core idea was to think about how architecture could grow and change, self-generating systems that could evolve with evolving society. The Osaka Expo of 1970 was perhaps most emblematic of the Metabolist design rhetoric, in particular the designs for Kenzo Tange's Festival Plaza and the Toshiba IHP and Takara Pavilions by Kisho Kurokawa.

While the symbiosis between technology and biology was one of the core ideas of the movement, Maki was more interested in understanding traditional spatial patterns and incorporating these into the design to humanise the unprecedented scale of the new city. He would begin to distance himself from the movement, focusing instead on the idea of collective form. This is reflected in his work with projects such as Hillside Terrace presenting a manifestation of his career in material form.

A built legacy of hybridity and lightness

While Maki’s first built project was in the United States, an arts centre at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri-Steinberg Hall, it was his investigation of ‘group form’ (or an urban organisation based on human scale) that would inform the greater part of his work. A particularly notable example is one of his earliest projects, The Hillside Terrace Apartment Complex in Tokyo which was completed in seven phases from 1967-92, highlighting the architect’s theory of incremental development. The design underscores the human through its scale and the assimilation of exterior and interior elements. As Maki would say about his work, it represents ‘unclear wholes containing clearly defined parts.’

Other notable projects by the architect from this time include the Fujisawa Gymnasium (1980-84) which he considered a defining moment in his career. The building, with its stainless steel clad roof that ‘floats’ above the arena is emblematic of his experimentation with material and form. On Maki’s Pritzker win, Kenneth Frampton noted how the gymnasium highlighted an “emerging sense of lightness,” something present in the design for the Kaze-no-Oka Crematorium (1997) as well. Further, the crematorium design highlighted the architect’s attention to context and the idea of parts making up a whole. The minimalist, geometric form and materials set it apart as distinctly Japanese with Western influences.

The sense for form, scale and material in his work would evolve in the latter part of the architect’s illustrious career, with almost a recontextualisation of his earlier informal approach to Rationalism evident in the solid forms of the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto to Tower 4 of the new World Trade Centre in New York and even the Shenzhen Sea World Culture and Art Centre. Frampton, in his essay on the Pritzker Prize winner, goes on to comment on the “city-in-miniature” scheme adopted by Maki, a quality that brings the structures closer to the human scale. As illustrated, this that can be traced throughout his work.  

For considering the human in the age of the megastructure, the architect would set himself apart. While he was awarded the Pritzker for a distinct language that borrowed from his experiences in the West, the fact that his buildings continued to think about human beings, cultures and technology is particularly inspiring. As with most luminaries, to remember them is to honour their presence through their work. Writing about Hillside, Maki stated, “Over time I have come to think of the buildings I have designed there as extensions of myself.” It is through them perhaps that his essence best lives on.