Fumihiko Maki. Architects can control only certain things

Born in 1928, Fumihiko Maki was trained under Kenzo Tange at the University of Tokyo, where he graduated in Architecture in 1952. He then completed a Master of Architecture degree at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), Harvard University, and began work at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, New York and, later, Sert Jackson and Associates in Cambridge. He returned to Tokyo in 1965, where he started his own firm, Maki and Associates. He is best-known for the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, New York’s Four World Trade Center, the Tokyo Spiral, Kyoto’s National Museum of Modern Art and Design Society in Shenzhen.   

One of the world’s foremost living modernists, AIA Gold Medalist and Pritzker laureate Fumihiko Maki’s celebrated career stretches over 60 years. Like other Japanese architects of his generation, Maki has spent a lifetime unafraid to embrace new technologies while insisting on their humanity. In this new video for the Time‑Space-Existence series, Maki discusses the importance in acknowledging human behavior in architecture, the strange shapes of today’s skyscrapers, and the influence of his mentor, Kenzo Tange.

Produced by PLANE–SITE, the video has been commissioned by the GAA Foundation and funded by the ECC in the run-up to the Time-Space-Existence exhibition during next Venice Architecture Biennale, opening May 2018.

Opening image: Fumihiko Maki, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, 2014