Word: maki
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...most celebrated architects tend toward extremism, stylistically speaking. It is the novelty and even freakishness of their visions that get them noticed in the first place, and followers of middle roads are usually middling talents. Fumihiko Maki is that rare designer whose buildings are decorous but also fetchingly strange, a little dreamlike. His rather subtle work has never got as much press as has the work of his more voguish Japanese peers Arata Isozaki and Tadao Ando (whose buildings are, respectively, Tokyo-by-way-of- Holl ywood lollapaloozas and ascetic Zen bunkers), but now that inequity seems moot: this week...
...Maki, 64, may be the most talented modernist practicing anywhere today, and his achievement probably could not be duplicated in any other country. "Modern architecture," Maki notes, "having rejected ornament, leaves an unbearable void if shorn of details and a sense of material, no matter how expressive its forms." Thus the proliferation of unbearable voids in downtowns all over the world, where builders have used modernism to justify cheap, uninteresting materials and shoddy construction detailing. Maki's buildings are extraordinary not just because they are intriguingly conceived but also because they are so meticulously made...
Although he has practiced since 1965 in Tokyo, Maki spent a decade studying and teaching in America. His only two buildings outside Japan are in the U.S., the first built 33 years ago on the Washington University campus in St. Louis, Missouri, the second now under construction in San Francisco over the subterranean Moscone Convention Center. Building the Yerba Buena Gardens Visual Arts Center hasn't been at all easy for an architect accustomed to Japanese standards of construction. "American craft at this moment is very low," he says. "We really struggled in San Francisco to achieve a certain quality...
...Fumihiko Maki, 59, is not so eager to build abroad. "At construction sites in Japan," he says, "workers are always so willing to cooperate with architects that we can do something almost unthinkable in the U.S. -- modify our designs in the process of building." Maki knows what he is talking about. He earned master's degrees in the '50s from Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Arts and from Harvard, taught at Harvard and practiced in New York City with Skidmore Owings & Merrill. He returned to Tokyo...
...then. Like much Japanese architecture of the past 25 years, it has a sci-fi quality: one section of the building resembles some enormous otherworldly blimp, the other calls to mind a high-tech samurai helmet. But unlike the slicker gimmicky UFO architecture (Kurokawa's earlier work, for instance), Maki's gym is restrained and sober, a mature fantasy. The flawless, parabolic stainless-steel skin is 1.6 acres in size but just about one-sixtieth of an inch thick...