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Fumihiko Maki

Japanese architect and Pritzker Prize winner who co-contributed 'Some thoughts on collective form' with Masato Ohtaka to the Kepes anthology Structure in Art and in Science alongside Buckminster Fuller.

Updated 2026-07-30 low confidence cold

Fumihiko Maki

Japanese architect (b. 1928); Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate (1993).

Fumihiko Maki is one of the most distinguished architects of postwar Japan, known for a body of work that synthesizes modernist clarity with a sensitivity to context, light, and the experience of urban space. Educated at the University of Tokyo, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (where he studied under Josep Lluis Sert and Kenzo Tange), he worked briefly for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Sert Jackson and Associates before returning to Japan to establish Maki and Associates in 1965. He was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1993 for buildings that combine "the best of both Eastern and Western cultural ideals."

Maki was associated with the Metabolist movement in the early 1960s, though his thinking diverged from the group's more utopian megastructural visions. His influential study Investigations in Collective Form (1964), co-authored with Masato Ohtaka, proposed three paradigms for understanding how groups of buildings relate to one another and to the city — compositional form, megastructure, and group form. This theoretical framework has remained a touchstone in urban design discourse. His major built works include the Hillside Terrace complex in Tokyo (1969–92), the Spiral Building (1985), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (1993), and 4 World Trade Center in New York (2013).

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: co-contributor. Maki co-contributed "Some thoughts on collective form" (with Masato Ohtaka) to Structure in Art and in Science (1965), the Gyorgy Kepes-edited anthology in which R. Buckminster Fuller contributed "Conceptuality of Fundamental Structures." Maki and Ohtaka's essay explored how collections of buildings create larger urban structures, bringing an architectural and urbanistic perspective to the anthology's investigation of structural principles across disciplines.

See Also

Sources

  • Structure in Art and in Science (source reference) — Zotero record for the anthology