Fumihiko Maki

Fumihiko Maki, chosen as the 1993 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, is the second architect from Japan to be so honored—the first being Kenzo Tange in 1987. Maki, who was born in Tokyo on September 6, 1928, studied with Tange at the University of Tokyo where he received his Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1952. Maki then spent the next year at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan where Eliel Saarinen's influence on the curriculum and as designer of the school's buildings was significant. He then took his Master of Architecture degree at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), Harvard University. His first apprenticeships were with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, New York and Sert Jackson and Associates in Cambridge. In 1956, he took a post as assistant professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also received his first design commission—for the Steinberg Hall (an art center) on that campus, which remains his only completed work in the United States. Following his four years there, he joined the faculty at Harvard's GSD from 1962 to 1965, and has been a frequent guest lecturer at numerous other schools. In 1965, he returned to Japan to establish his own firm, Maki and Associates in Tokyo. In the 28 years since, his staff has grown to approximately 35 people, with an equal number having passed through to begin their own practices. "I was never attracted to the idea of a large organization. On the other hand, a small organization may tend to develop a very narrow viewpoint. My ideal is a group structure that allows people with diverse imaginations, that often contradict and are in conflict with one another, to work in a condition of flux, but that also permits the making of decisions that are as calculated and objectively weighed as necessary for the creation of something as concrete as architecture."