Fumihiko Maki
Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
1993
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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."
While he was preparing to open his own office,
Maki worked at, or observed, numerous offices in Japan and other countries.
One of the conclusions he drew was that an office, and by extension, design
itself, is a matter of individual character, and that an office is itself
a work of art. "Architectural design is perhaps the strangest activity
undertaken by the many professions, and a group that engages in architectural
design is likewise a curious organization. Architecture is a highly ambiguous
field," Maki continued.
Most of Maki's work has been accomplished
in Japan, although he is currently working on a number of commissions both
in Europe and the United States. When his office building complex for Isar
Buro Park near Munich is completed in 1994, it will be his first realized
European project.
Later this year, a second realized work in
the United States will be completed—the Yerba Buena Gardens Visual Arts
Center, part of a large scale redevelopment in downtown San Francisco involving
a number of prominent architects (Mario Botta, James Polshek, Mitchell/Giurgola,
I.M. Pei). The Visual Arts Center by Maki is currently under construction,
literally on top of the Moscone Convention Center.
Maki is the first to acknowledge that as a
student, he came under the influence of post-Bauhaus internationalism.
That plus ten years of study and work in the United States afforded him
the ability to step back and take a view from a distance of both Japan
and America, as well as other parts of the world. It is to this experience
that he attributes what people have called an aesthetic sense that is intelligible
to a world audience.
Maki calls himself a modernist, unequivocally.
His structures tend to be made of metal, concrete and glass, the classic
materials of the modernist age, but the canonical palette has also been
extended to include such materials as mosaic tile, anodized aluminum and
stainless steel. Along with a great many other Japanese architects, he
has maintained a consistent interest in new technology as part of his design
language, quite often taking advantage of modular systems in construction.
He makes a conscious effort to capture the spirit of a place and an era,
producing with each building or complex of buildings, a work that makes
full use of all that is presently at his command. As far as post-modernism
is concerned, Maki has been quoted as saying, "In the West it might be
all right, but in Japan, post modernism using historic motifs would simply
evaporate." And with it, so evaporates the modern/post-modern debate as
an issue of style. "The problem of modernity is not creating forms," says
Maki, "but rather, creating an overall image of life, not necessarily dominated
by the concept of modernity." For him, this overall image is in essence
a question of space for human activity rather than a vision of a constructed
facade. Maki often speaks of the idea of creating "unforgettable scenes"
—in effect, stage settings to accommodate and complement all kinds of human
interaction —as the inspiration and starting point for his designs.
As a founding member of the Metabolists in
1960, his name became associated with the group's large-scale urban designs
and plans. However, his buildings are not "megastructures," a term he invented.
As Bill Lacy, in his book, 100 Contemporary Architects states, "His
gigantic Nippon Convention Center in Tokyo shows how a huge building can
possess qualities missing in the vast megastructures of the modernist years.
The center...is modeled on the prototypical Japanese community nestled
among hills and was intended to set the tone and direction for future urban
growth in the area. Its vast volume and distinctive silhouette becomes
a man-made mountain range in an otherwise flat, waterfront topography.
The facility is organized along a central spine nearly one-third of a mile
long and its vast exhibition hall is covered with a curved roof...elements
as background forms for a diversity of human-scaled components."
Most critics agree that even with his most
enormous buildings, Maki's works are at ground level, scaled appropriately
to provide human warmth and excitement. In Contemporary Architects,
Ching-Yu
Chang wrote, "While Maki has rightly gained considerable notoriety as a
theoretician, he has clearly not allowed his thinking to become clouded
with esoteric ideas. He applies his belief in module, standardized parts
and adaptability for change in a very utilitarian, pragmatic way. It is
apparent that the thrust of his design attention is not the glorification
of these concepts, but the successful employment of them to create inclusive
highly contextual architecture that is in strict accord with human, psychological
preferences."
Maki wrote as early as 1960, and it is still
relevant today, "There is no more critically concerned observer of our
rapidly changing society than the urban designer. Charged with giving form—with
perceiving and contributing order—to agglomerates of buildings, highways,
and green spaces in which men have increasingly come to work and live,
the urban designer stands between technology and human need and seeks to
make the first a servant, for the second must be paramount in a civilized
world."
In Maki's Osaka Prefectural Sports Center,
he unifies many separate spaces with a central spine, much like a street
with different levels—in this case allowing access to the gymnasium at
one end and to a restaurant, observation deck at the other. Here the diner
can look back over a roof garden to an entrance plaza, in effect, looking
through a layering of transparent planes and spaces—a concept that relates
to many of Maki's buildings.
In his Hillside Terrace Apartments, a complex
of buildings developed over a period of 25 years (and thus nearly spanning
the firm's entire history), a strategy of transparent layering creates
a series of shared scenes or landscapes within an urban context. Wandering
through the complex, one encounters intimate courtyards hidden away amid
greenery, linked by meandering passages and discovered only by accident
of a sideways glance. By articulating several layers of threshold spaces
between the busy street edge and the densely wooded interior of the block,
Maki is able to impart a sense of depth to spaces that physically are quite
compact.
The most recent decade has brought an even
greater sense of lightness to Maki's work. The Fujisawa Gymnasium is particularly
illustrative of this freer sensibility—its sharp, stainless steel clad
roof seems virtually to float above the main arena, separated from the
spectator stands by a ribbon of light and supported only at four points.
Some critics have likened its complex metallic form to a spaceship or a
beetle, while others have deemed it reminiscent of a medieval samurai helmet.
New York architect Emilio Ambasz wrote, "There
is in the Fujisawa project a serene majesty, an elegant dignity which forces
us to admire the extraordinary generosity of a reticent artist who loves
his material more than himself; who has reduced the building to its essential
core so that when touched, it will not be the instrument we admire but
rather the sound which emanates for it. In Fujisawa, Maki calls forth the
gods of Japanese architecture."
Bill Lacy, describing Maki's YKK Guest House,
wrote of great architects understanding that their designs begin with the
premise that stone, glass, steel and concrete are only the means by which
light is allowed to create form and space. "YKK Guest House is a striking
example of the manipulation of light to artistic purposes by a master architect,"
he explained, and continued that the YKK Guest House is the three dimensional
representation of the maxim attributed to Michelangelo: "There should be
nothing superfluous, yet, nothing wanting in sculpture." Lacy concluded,
"It is a building that grows from the inside out and whose exterior composition
is so carefully balanced that its appearance works equally well in all
seasons—day or night. The overall impression is one of appropriateness—to
program, to site and to the special cultural aesthetics that is distinctively
Japanese."
Because he is convinced that public places—both
interior and exterior—are the best catalysts for generating human interaction,
he places great importance on the spatial design of the public realm. Nearly
all of his projects have interior and exterior spaces that interact visually—for
example the Tepia Science Pavilion (1989) whose first floor exhibition
spaces and second floor cafe enjoy a view out to a broad courtyard garden.
One of Maki's most significant projects is
the Hillside Terrace complex which he began to design in 1967 and has continued
to work on right up until the last year when the final phase was completed.
Nothing like it had been seen in Japan before.
It was to be primarily residential with shops. With Maki's overall plan,
it represents "a graceful and appropriate architectural interpretation
and channeling of existing trends," said David B. Stewart, writing in Space
Design.
Hillside Terrace is an example of small-scale
town planning as it was practiced nearly a century ago. The fact that it
has been designed and built over 25 years makes it unique in that it was
being accomplished while architectural fashions were changing, as well
as the architect's own views. Nearly every aspect of the original master
plan, from the layout of open space to the typology of apartment buildings
and distribution of commercial spaces, went through radical revisions over
the course of twenty-five years, developing as a series of improvisations
on a theme. Nevertheless, the intimate scale of courtyards, the open character
of public space enhanced by axial views and transparent layering, and the
subtle adaptation of existing topography were basic to the first designs
and have followed through the design of the last phase.
According to Hiroyuki Suzuki, Architecture
Professor at the University of Tokyo, "Following the orthodox tradition
by which the city has taken shape in Tokyo, Maki applied the modernist
architectural methodology to a process of construction that lasted longer
than any other project of this kind, elevating it into an original technique
of townscape building. Here we can see for ourselves what the seemingly
self-contradictory concept of memory of modernity means."
As a student of two cultures whose fusion
of the two influences has been greatly acclaimed, Maki recently wrote of
his native Tokyo with nostalgia and hope. "Tokyo is the place where I was
born, raised, and educated. It was also in Tokyo that I became familiar
with some of the few works of modern architecture that existed in the 1930s
in Japan—the white houses of such modern pioneers as Kameki Tsuchiura (who
was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright when the latter was in Japan designing
the old Imperial Hotel), Sutemi Horiguchi, Antonin Raymond. Tokyo has changed
greatly in the half century since then." He continued that his office will
have left an architectural imprint in at least 30 places in Tokyo and environs—ten
houses or apartments, two embassies, four universities, two schools, three
cultural facilities, one gymnasium, three office buildings and three commercial
buildings.
He likens his Tokyo to Manhattan, where dynamic
and static elements are in continual conflict, "and being in its midst
is like standing on the beach as waves ceaselessly advance and recede."
He confides, "It is in this context that architecture must be built. Architecture
can no longer provide the old order of traditional townscapes but it may
have an even greater influence today as the nexus between human beings
and a constantly changing environment."
In 1970, Maki wrote: "The ultimate aim of
architecture is to create spaces to serve society, and in order to achieve
this, the architect must understand human activities from the standpoints
of history, ecology, and changing trends. He must also know the relationship
existing between human activities and architectural spaces and processes
by means of which these relationships develop."
Citation from the Pritzker
Jury
Fumihiko Maki of Japan is an architect whose
work is intelligent and artistic in concept and expression, meticulously
achieved.
He is a modernist who has fused the best of
both eastern and western cultures to create an architecture representing
the age-old qualities of his native country while at the same time juxtaposing
contemporary construction methods and materials.
His first exposure to modern architecture
was in 1930s Tokyo where a few pioneering architects departed from traditional
and European styles. Following his graduation from the University of Tokyo,
he came to the United States for further study at Cranbrook Academy of
Art and at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design under Jose Luis
Sert. He later taught at Washington University, where as a young professor,
he designed his first built work. These early experiences helped build
the foundation for his own unique style that would reflect his cosmopolitan
view of the world.
Early in his career, he became a founding
member of an avant garde group of talented young Japanese architects calling
themselves Metabolists, a word derived from the Greek with various meanings
—alteration, variation, revolution — changeability and flexibility being
key elements of their view. One aim was never to design in isolation from
the city structure as a whole.
Maki has expressed his constant concern for
the "parts" and the "whole — describing one of his goals as achieving a
dynamic equilibrium that includes sometimes conflicting masses, volumes,
and materials.
He uses light in a masterful way making it
as tangible a part of every design as are the walls and roof. In each building,
he searches for a way to make transparency, translucency and opacity exist
in total harmony. To echo his own words, "Detailing is what gives architecture
its rhythm and scale."
There is amazing diversity in his work — from
the awesome Nippon Convention Center near Tokyo with its man-made mountain
range of stainless steel roofs to his earlier and smaller YKK Guest House
or a planned orphan village in Poland.
The dimensions of his work measure a career
that has greatly enriched architecture. As a prolific author as well as
architect and teacher, Maki contributes significantly to the understanding
of the profession.
Maki has described creation in architecture
as "discovery, not invention...a cultural act in response to the common
imagination or vision of the time." Further, he believes, "it is the responsibility
of the architect to leave behind buildings that are assets to culture."
For building works that are not only expressions
of his time, but that are destined to survive mere fashion, the 1993 Pritzker
Architecture Prize is presented to Fumihiko Maki.
Thoughts
On Fumihiko Maki
by
Kenneth Frampton
Ware Professor of Architecture
The Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation
Columbia University, New York
Profoundly influenced by Jose Lluis Sert and
hence steeped in the ameliorative rationalism of the early modern movement,
Fumihiko Maki enjoys the reputation of consistently creating an architecture
that aside from responding to society's needs, also comprises a constructional
fabric which is durable and aesthetically vibrant. In this regard his practice
may be fairly compared to that of Norman Foster, Gunter Benisch and Renzo
Piano, all of whom, while expressively different, have displayed a similar
penchant for efficient, ludic, lightweight form.
Lightness, both in fact and in metaphor, has
been an emerging theme in Maki's architecture for some time and today his
work invariably manifests a spatiality that derives in large measure from
the immateriality of modern material. Like much of today's production his
work places a particular emphasis on the membrane irrespective of whether
this is an atectonic layering of planes or a taut skin drawn over a vaulted
superstructure. Either way Maki gravitates towards an architecture that
is both present and absent at the same time, like the transitory illusions
of the cinema screen for which he retains a particular passion. This last
came to the fore in 1990, when he entered the competition for the Palazzo
del Cinema in Venice. Of this he wrote:
"Our proposal for the Palazzo del Cinema attempts
to express the spirit of Venice, both external and temporal, in one striking
entity: a glass palace on the water, Changing from day to night; its solid
mass is gradually transformed and dissolved into a glowing festive illusion.
Under the glistening of twilight, appears an alluring image of glass, a
reflection of the ephemeral state of Venice seen through a screen of fog,
or perhaps a vision of a world that exists only through the magic of light
as in the cinema itself." 1
This technocratic re-interpretation of the
traditional Japanese Ukiyoe or "floating-world" has hardly come easily
to Maki, as we may judge from the Hillside Terrace apartments in Tokyo
with which his career began in 1966 and to which he would add one fragment
after another, including a recent phase, dating from 1992.
Needless to say, his syntax has changed across
time, from the informal, cubic rationalism of the initial buildings, evidently
indebted to Sert, to the tesselated minimalism of the middle period and
the layered, light membraceous character of the last. Throughout this long
haul Maki has maintained the sense of a loosely-assembled "city-in-miniature"
in which interlocking, in-between spaces, paralleling the street, assure
the civic character of the whole while subtly avoiding gratuitous aestheticism
on the one hand and simple-minded functionalism on the other.
Two works announce the emergence of lightness
as an all pervasive theme in Maki's architecture, the Fujisawa Gymnasium,
completed in 1984, and the Tepia Science Pavilion, built at Minato, Tokyo
in 1989. Of the two it is the gymnasium that takes its cue from the Japanese
modern tradition by re-interpreting the heavy-weight, catenary form of
Kenzo Tange's Olympic Stadia of 1960. Unlike Tange's anti-seismic, megastructural
heroics, however, Fujisawa is a light, athletic and critically responsive
work, directly related to the ephemeral character of the late modern world.
Of this work Maki has written:
"If a strong totality, with suppressed parts
and a hierarchical composition are characteristic of classicist architecture,
active and assertive parts are characteristic of Gothic architecture, and
the early works of modern architecture. Today, I find myself more strongly
attracted to the second organizational type. One reason is that working
from the parts permits a freer formal interpretation of how various formal
and environmental demands — including those of a historical and symbolic
nature — are to be met..." 2
Elsewhere he will write of the profile of
Fujisawa as symbolizing through its sharp but simultaneously soft outline
the fundamental ambiguity of the modern world. However Fujisawa will only
be the first in a series of such thin shell structures in which layered,
crustaceous membranes of stainless steel are carried on longspan steel
trusses, grounded in concrete podia. Within this development both the Makuhari
Messe, built at Chiba in 1989 and the Tokyo Municipal Gymnasium of 1990
are equally dematerialized shell structures of a similar order.
Through such hovering forms, Maki has been
able to render his concept of a fragmentary urbanism at a higher symbolic
level, in which these modern "cathedrals" stand out against the chaos of
the Megalopolis as civic catalysts. The highly reflective shell roofs of
Fujisawa and Makuhari imply, at vastly different scales, a new kind of
urban enclave with which to engender and sustain a more fluid and shifting
conception of public space. With its 540 metre long undulating metal roof
(40 metres short of Paxton's Crystal Palace) and its 120 metre span, the
Makuhari Exhibition Hall dwarfs the two-way, shell roofed spans of the
Fujisawa and Tokyo gymnasiums, so that one spontaneously associates its
vastness with such mega-engineering works as the George Washington Bridge.
Its length is such that the various ancillary structures running down its
side, entry-foyer, events hall, etc., recall nothing so much as so many
tugboats at the side of a transatlantic liner.
If the ultimate point of departure for Fujisawa
Gymnasium resides in the Gothic, the Tepia Pavilion finds its parti
in the Rietveld/Schroeder House of 1924 and in Le Corbusier's Villa Shodan
of 1956. And yet while Maki is indebted to these canonically modern paradigms
for the overall planar, pin-wheeling, form assumed by the pavilion, the
underlying order is classic, even if the implicit cubic mass and the regular
columnar grid never fully materialize. Thus unlike the Iwasaki Museum and
his own house, dating from the late 1970's, where an asymmetrical mass
is stabilized about an axis, Tepia establishes its center of gravity in
relation to a small triangular occulus set in the center of its main facade.
While Tepia is planned like a palazzo about an "atrium," little of this
classicism prevails in the overall spatial organization, so that it both
evokes and denies the classic to an equal degree. If, as Serge Lalat has
argued, Maki proceeds by a process of crystallization, he also undermines
this procedure by simultaneously engaging in an act of dematerialization.
This is particularly true of his orthogonal works, such as Tepia, where
the detailing of the fenestration, tends to dissolve the surface into which
it is set. Thus, notwithstanding Maki's unwavering commitment to programmatic
rationality, the final expression is subtly mannered. It is, as Arata Isozaki
once put it, an architecture of quotation par excellence, so that
Tepia recalls not only Reitveld and Le Corbusier, but also Walter Gropius;
in particular the thin-oversailing roofs and transparent cylindrical stair
towers of Gropius' Werkbund Building of 1914.
Whether Maki is tectonic as in the
Fujisawa, or atectonic as in Tepia, the dematerialization of the
surface persists throughout and in this regard, Maki's work may be compared
to that of Carlo Scarpa, wherein as Manfred Tafuri once put it, "one is
confronted by a perverse dialectic between the celebration of form and
the scattering of its parts." And yet while Maki is willing to acknowledge
his proximity to Scarpa, he also evokes an immaterial spirituality that
seems totally removed from the tactile, ontological depth that is so characteristic
of Scarpa's architecture. In each instance a common cross-cultural collagiste
strategy is employed, to quite different ends; Scarpa being as much influenced
by the East, as Maki has been touched by the West. However, Maki's mode
of synthesis is quite unique for while his Wacoa Building combines elements
drawn to an equal degree from the occident and orient, the synthesis of
the two is achieved through the tradition of sukiya. This same procedure
may be found in the Tepia Building only at a higher level of resolution.
In taking its distance from the aristocratic tradition of the shoin,
the sukiya manner opened itself to a wider and more heterogenous
assembly of different values. This sense of eclectic subversion, endemic
to the sukiya style, appears as Kazuhiro Ishii has pointed out,
in the categoric departure of Tepia from the parti the Villa Shodan.
"The transformation from the concrete of the
Villa Shodan to high-tech metal, breaks abruptly with the contradictory
traditional theories of the past. Symbolic of the break are the sharp corners,
which relate to the bevelling of corners (hakkake) practiced in
sukiya
buildings, to make posts and alcove framework members look more slender."
3
Unlike most of his contemporaries Maki unites
within his practice two rather contradictory positions; on the one hand
an ethical commitment to the provision of an architecture that is both
rational and appropriate, on the other, an ironic disposition capable of
acknowledging the aporias of the modern world and of confronting the ever-escalating
implosion of information and development. Maki regards the inescapably
disjunctive character of this last with a dispassionate, Olympian eye.
Generous to a fault, he will acknowledge that the programmatic indifference
of Deconstructivist Architecture as an understandable reaction to the schismatic
character of our time. At the same time he remains detached and judicious,
resisting, without becoming reactionary, the temptation to indulge in the
plastic and iconographic excesses of the younger generation. Instead his
work is informed by a disconcerting and contradictory combination of anxiety
and optimism. On the one hand he remains extremely skeptical, while, on
the other, he projects the Blochian idea of hope; the famous "not yet"
of the Weimar Republic.
There is surely no non-Gallic architect who
is more French than Fumihiko Maki for one cannot look at his career or
listen to his words without being reminded of the French intellectual tradition
at its best. Master architect and mandarin he turns his face towards technology
in the belief that this apocalyptical demiurge carries within itself the
sole seeds of our salvation. While maintaining a playful and ironic stance,
Maki insists that only thought is transferable, so that when one thinks
of his impeccable self-discipline one is irrestibly reminded of Le Corbusier's
immortal words: "The man who is intelligent, cold and calm has grown wings
to himself." 4
Footnotes to the essay by Kenneth Frampton:
1 See Fumihiko Maki 1987-1992 Space
Design 93-01, SD No, 340, Kajima Publishing Co, Ltd, Tokyo, January
1993, p. 172.
2 See
Serge Salat and Francoise Labbe Fumihiko Maki: An Aesthetic of Fragmentation,
Rizzoli, New York, 1988, p. 82. See also Fumihiko Maki, "Modernism as the
Crossroads", The Japan Architect, March 1983,
3 See Kasuhiro Ishii, "Impressions
of Tepia: an Architectural Monument to its Times" The Japan Architect
1990, Aug-Sept., v. 65, no, 8-9, p. 65.
4 Le
Corbusier Towards a New Architecture, Translated by Frederick Etchells,
The Architectural Press, London, 3rd Edition, 1948. p. 119.
Formal
Presentation Ceremony at the Spanish Hall, Prague Castle, The Czech Republic
June 10, 1993
Speeches as follows:
Bill
Lacy, Secretary to the Jury
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome
to the 1993 Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony.
I am Bill Lacy, Secretary to the jury of the
Prize and we are here this evening to honor Mr. Fumihiko Maki as the 16th
Laureate.
Mr. President, Ambassador Basora, Mr. Pritzker,
honored guests, it is my pleasure to open tonight's celebration.
The history of civilization can be told in
the context of wars and architecture. This endless building up and tearing
down of our dreams and aspirations is a reflection of the constructive
and destructive sides of human nature. We are here this evening to celebrate
that positive impulse representing the best of which we are capable, and
to recognize the work of a great talent in the field of architecture.
Politics, of necessity, must deal with current
events — a changing tableau of economic conditions, social pressures and
popular tastes. Architecture, however, has a different time clock, one
measured in hundreds of years not terms of office or shifting allegiances
of self interest. Where better to illustrate this fact than to have the
ceremony in a city of architecture that has endured for one thousand years?
In its 15 years of existence, the Pritzker
Architecture Prize has a tradition of having its ceremonies in distinguished
places that reflect its purpose — the recognition of architecture and its
influence as an art form.
Last fall when members of the jury came here
to enjoy the perfectness of Prague, we began to hope that we might have
this year's event in this marvelous city. We were encouraged in that hope
by the first President of the Czech Republic and made our plans in earnest.
In the United States we have had one president
who was an architect, Thomas Jefferson — who turned out rather well. President
Havel has in a sense been the architect of this great new republic and
has added distinction to our prize by his presence this evening.
It is my privilege to introduce President
Václav Havel.
Václav Havel
President of the Czech Republic
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests.
First of all let me express to all of you
my most cordial welcome in my capacity as a sort of host in this house.
I should also like to express my gratitude
to Mr. Pritzker and the jury that awards the Pritzker Architecture Prize
for choosing Prague and the Prague Castle in particular as the place of
this year's conveyance ceremony.
This is a great honour for this country, for
this city and for this castle as well.
However I also hope that the fact that this
top event of the world of architecture is taking place here will draw the
attention of modern architects to Prague and to the Prague Castle because
both the city and the Castle, although looking beautiful, need a lot of
work.
Finally I should like to extend my congratulations
to Mr. Maki for having been awarded this year's Prize.
Thank you.
J. Carter Brown
Chairman of the Jury
Mr. President, Chairman, Excellencies, distinguished
guests, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Carter Brown, the chairman of the jury
for the Pritzker Prize, and on behalf of that jury, it is my privilege
to thank you, Mr. President, for our being here. We like your house. You
have given us perhaps, a new definition of la vie da Boheme.
The Pritzker Prize is determined by a jury,
many of whom are with us tonight. They come, many of them from great distances,
to be in Prague tonight. Ada Louise Huxtable, distinguished architectural
critic, formerly of the New York Times. Charles Correa from India,
distinguished architect and winner of the Royal Institute of British Architect's
Gold Medal. Frank Gehry, a Pritzker Prize winner, from Los Angeles. Ricardo
Legorreta, from Mexico City, an architect very much in demand these days.
Toshio Nakamura from Tokyo, Japan, editor of A+U, the great encyclopaedia
in our field — he is a walking encyclopaedia. And we also have two former
Pritzker Laureates with us: Hans Hollein of Vienna, and Gottfried Boehm
of Germany. Welcome all of you.
The idea of being in this castle, I think
bears witness to the importance of patronage, often unsung, to the art
of architecture. Those of us in the art world have grown up revering Rudolph
II, and many of the other great figures you have called into being in this
great assemblage. But tonight, I wanted particularly to pay homage to another
great democratic president, Jan Masyryck, who had first of all the intelligence
to marry an American wife, and secondly, the enormous intelligence to engage
Jose Pletschnik whose work you have experienced in entering here and whose
architectural quality bears witness to how important patronage can be in
a democratic society.
Speaking of democracy, we are flattered to
have not only the President here which does such honor to the art of architecture,
but also the Chairman of the Chamber of Deputies, Mr. Milan Uhde, who has
yet another distinction, which in our world is particularly significant,
he is a former Minister of Culture. Chairman Uhde.
Milan Uhde
President, Chamber of Deputies
Parliament of the Czech Republic
Mr. President Mrs. Havlova, ladies and gentlemen,
it is my blessed task to salute today's great event, the presentation of
this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize.
First of all, let me pay homage to Mr. Pritzker's
idea to select Prague Castle as the venue for awarding this splendid prize
which bears his name, it is a gem of historical architecture which integrates
different styles into an organic whole, as if history itself were the main
architect of this monument.
Of all forms of art, architecture is most
closely tied to life. Like a poet who dreams, an architect is at the same
time a servant devoted to an aim. I will never forget a short text in which,
at the beginning of this century, Adolf Loos of Vienna expressed his tribute
to the shape of the roofs on rural abodes in the Alps—explaining at the
same time that this shape had been born from the farmers' efforts to deal
with the high layer of snow that falls in the Alps every year.
The spirit of beauty and the spirit of purpose
form in architecture a holy trinity with the spirit which causes us to
feel at home in an architect's work. It is increasingly more difficult
to keep this trinity together and in balance. The world is growing more
and more international; new building materials appear and offer new opportunities
but also a temptation of unification.
This year's Pritzker Prize, the world's most
prestigious award, was ascribed by the distinguished jury to a Japanese
architect, Mr. Fumihiko Maki. I am happy to greet in him a distinctly Japanese
and simultaneously a distinctly global creative artist. I am aware that
he described the European Bauhaus, that wonderful cradle of many an idea
and many a materialisation, as one of his starting points. I am aware that
after training in the U.S.A., he worked intensively and diligently in his
own country, but that through his artistic empathy he could, and can, create
homes for people in other countries as well.
I am impressed by architecture also due to
the fact that in its order it synthesizes creative individuality with the
principle of team work. Mr. Fumihiko Maki is not only the leader of a team
but also a teacher, which is a higher level of team work and lays the foundations
for the artist's immortality in a natural way.
In his latest novel the author Milan Kundera
declared longing for immortality to be a special obsession of creative
people. Allegedly, immortality for them is complicated by expounders who
distort their work and foist their dubious interpretation on it.
Like every great architect, Mr. Fumihiko Maki
touches immortality much more immediately than artists of other forms.
In his works, people live and will live — and in fact, expounders will
not have any opportunity to interlope between the author and the audience.
You have certainly noticed that what I say
is an attempt at praise of architecture.
Our poems, novels, plays, pictures, symphonic
compositions, songs and films may escape our mind as soon as our eyes or
cars cease to perceive them. But an architect's creation becomes a wonderful
and permanent part of our life, its expression and its monument.
Praise be on the work that has been done by
Mr. Fumihiko Maki and which ranks him among the leading architects of today's
world. This is continued by the bronze medallion which commemorates architecture's
features by Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas — firmness,
utility and beauty.
Esteemed Maestro, let me congratulate you
cordially to the Pritzker Prize award, let me congratulate all architects
to their today's informal global holiday.
Sincere thanks to all those who have merit
for this evening, the joy and elation that mark it.
Good evening to all of you.
Adrian A. Basora
United States Ambassador to the Czech Republic
Mr. President, Mr. Pritzker and Mr. Maki,
esteemed and honored guests, it is a privilege to be able to introduce
or say a couple of words about one of the world's most distinguished architects
in the presence of one of the world's most distinguished Presidents, and
I should say, one of the world's most distinguished parliamentary leaders.
The German poet Goethe once praised architecture
as "frozen music," and recently, the writer Havelock Ellis cited architecture,
along with dancing, as the beginning of all the arts, perhaps as we just
heard because it is closest to human kind and daily life.
This strange but evocative association of
the art of building with the art of music seems particularly apt in the
case of the winner of the 1993 Pritzker Architecture Prize, Mr. Fumihiko
Maki.
His works have been described by the distinguished
jury which awarded the prize as a search for "total harmony." I too believe
that Mr. Maki's buildings are symphonic structures uniting rhythm and scale,
speaking a language every bit as universal as that of music.
It is the universality of Mr. Maki's achievements
which makes the award of the 1993 Pritzker Prize tonight in Prague's Hradcany
Castle such a moving (for me), and internationally important event.
We see here tonight, as we do in Mr. Maki's
works, the cultures and traditions of three continents — Europe, America,
and Asia — coming together in a way that emphasizes the common chords of
the human experience.
In today's world, the hope, I should say the
only hope, for the future truly lies in the building of structures such
as Mr. Maki's, which span diverse traditions and cultures and join them
all in a harmoniously created environment.
If architecture is indeed the most basic of
the human arts, then Mr. Maki's achievement stands as a symbol for what
human kind as a whole can and should hope to achieve: that is, a stable,
beautiful, well-functioning, and I should add, peaceful, international
environment.
Certainly that is what Hradcany Castle, under
the presidency of President Havel represents to the world. And, the Pritzker
Prize itself is also a manifestation of the cultural bridges or spans that
we need in this world to draw our diverse societies together in peace.
I therefore applaud Jay Pritzker for his foresight in establishing this
award, and I hope that the choice of Prague as the location for this year's
award ceremony will add a new dimension, a philosophical dimension that
we see in Mr. Maki's works. And then the events here today, the visit of
the Pritzker Foundation and the jury, will lead to a more rapid acceleration
of the rebuilding of the ties, bridges and spans between the Czech people,
and the American and the Japanese, and other free world peoples, and of
course, specifically ties among architects, schools of architecture, and
all of the related arts and disciplines.
Congratulations to you, Mr. Maki, for your
life-long achievement, and to you, Mr. Pritzker, and the members of the
jury, for your vision in awarding this well-deserved recognition.
Finally, Mr. President, I would like to thank
you and the Czech Republic for so generously hosting tonight's event. May
I now introduce Mr. Jay Pritzker, whose vision and generosity have made
this event possible.
Jay A. Pritzker
President, The Hyatt Foundation
President Havel, Ambassador Asomura, Ambassador
Basora, and other honored guests, we have gathered here tonight to honor
a man who has been praised for combining the best of both eastern and western
cultures — in a field that has been variously described through history
as a science, a craft, a technology, an art — indeed, as the mother of
all the arts — architecture.
That was how newsman Edwin Newman defined
it when we celebrated the tenth anniversary of the prize with a television
symposium in 1990 titled Architecture and the City, Friends or Foes?
Mother of all the arts or not, at the very
least everyone will agree that architecture serves the primary human need
for shelter, in fact it was one of man's first expressions of creativity.
Perhaps Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who designed
Tugendhat House in Brno, said it best: "Architecture starts when you carefully
put two bricks together. There it begins." And where has it led? Most of
us take for granted the places where we work and live every day —making
architecture both the least and most conspicuous of art forms.
That architecture is far more than mere shelter
is made plainly evident right here where we are tonight, in Prague Castle,
with roots that go back to the tenth century. The entire city of Prague
has been called a living museum of architecture because so much beautiful
work has been preserved over the centuries.
Walter Gropius said, "Architecture begins
where engineering ends." And in the same vein, Luis Barragan, who was the
second Pritzker Laureate in 1980, said, "Any work of architecture that
does not express serenity is a mistake."
Yet another great architect, Eero Saarinen,
defined the purpose of architecture "to shelter and enhance man's life
on earth and to fulfill his belief in the nobility of his existence." The
Saarinens, father and son, profoundly influenced Cranbrook Academy where
Mr. Maki studied following his undergraduate degree at Tokyo University
and prior to his Masters degree at Harvard.
All of these views closely parallel the aims
of the Pritzker Architecture Prize—to honor a living architect whose work
demonstrates a combination of talent, vision and commitment to produce
significant contributions to humanity through the art of architecture.
By its very nature, the art of architecture
is most obvious in the city, although the city is not architecture's only
concern.
German architect Gottfried Boehm said when
he became a Pritzker Laureate in 1986, "I think the future of architecture
does not lie so much in continuing to fill up the landscape, as in bringing
back life and order to our cities and towns."
And that was the consensus of our symposium,
that "architects are certainly not the foes of the city, but perhaps they
have not been friendly enough."
Fumihiko Maki, our honoree this year has certainly
been friendly to the city. One of his projects, Hillside Terrace apartments
in Tokyo, has been likened to a living history of modern architecture because
it was begun some 25 years ago and proceeded in stages until finished just
last year.
Maki likens the city to standing on a beach
where waves ceaselessly advance and recede, a new context in which architecture
must be thought of as a link between people and the constantly changing
environment.
In the 1930's when Maki was just a youngster,
he recalls being profoundly influenced when he saw houses by modern pioneers—one
a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, and another by Antonin Raymond—who incidentally
was born in Bohemia and educated at Prague Polytechnic Institute.
And so we come full circle—east being influenced
by the west, the west being influenced by the east. Who was it that said
the twain shall never meet?
One editor commented in the story about Maki
winning the prize that most people who know him around the world will be
saying "it couldn't happen to a nicer guy," and speaking from my own experience,
I heartily agree.
Mr. Maki, if you will join me on the podium,
on behalf of The Hyatt Foundation and the Pritzker Family, I would like
to present you with the 1993 Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Fumihiko
Maki's Acceptance Speech
First, I would like to express my many thanks
to Mr. Jay Pritzker, the members of The Hyatt Foundation, and the jury
members of the Award Committee, without whose support I would not have
been here in the first place. I am truly grateful for the honor that you
are bestowing on me tonight, which seems to validate and encourage the
kind of interests and endeavors I have been pursuing over nearly 40 years
of work in architecture. I am also acutely aware that there are many other
deserving candidates for this prize, and therefore it truly came as a surprise
to be picked from among such esteemed peers and colleagues. In receiving
this award, I want to acknowledge the mutual support and shared ideals
amongst this expanding group of friends, whose collaboration, criticism,
and comraderie have made my work in architecture so personally rewarding.
I want to extend my deepest appreciation to
all of you — friends, family, peers and supporters — who have come to Prague
Castle to share with me in the award celebration this evening, and in particular
I want to say how honored I am that President Havel has taken time out
from his busy schedule to be here with us.
The opportunity to hold this ceremony in the
city that to me is most beloved in Europe is really quite a moving experience.
And as I think about the fact that we are here gathered from various parts
of the world, representing so many different cities, I am moved to say
something about cities and their role in inspiring not only architecture
but life and culture in general. In retrospect, my whole life, both privately
and professionally, has been and still is continuously interwoven with
of the lives of various cities, each with its own lessons or messages.
In my acceptance speech tonight I would like to talk briefly on three cities
which have made profound impact on my thinking about architecture. In other
words, this is a "tale of three cities."
The first city I would like to speak of is
Tokyo where I was born and raised, and where I still live with my family
and practice architecture today. In the early 30s, the time of my childhood
years, Tokyo had much of the ambience and the physical appearance that
it had inherited from the previous century. In the Yamanote, or "upper
town", where I lived, streets were often shadowed by big trees and were
dark in evenings. Small streets and narrow alleys were unpaved. After it
rained, the smell of the earth and vegetation permeated the air. Those
streets where today we find heavy vehicular traffic in those days were
for people strolling and bicycling. In the summer, the people came out
of their houses and stores to get a bit of the cool air and watched children
playing with fireworks, whose sound could be heard even from quite a distance
away. These scenes were still reminiscent of the city which nearly two-hundred
years earlier had already become the biggest metropolis in the world and
was also at that time arguably the world's greatest garden city.
The buildings of Tokyo in the 30s were mostly
low in scale and subdued in color and texture. Most residential houses
had clay-tile roofs and wooden finishes on the walls, sometimes cemented
over on the street front. Public buildings, banks and some important commercial
structures such as department stores were styled according to Western Neo-Classicism.
The same 30s did, however, witness the emergence
of the first modern architecture here and there. I still remember vividly
those occasions when I visited with my parents their friend's houses and
small exhibition places and tea parlors in public parks. Their very articulated
cubic forms, whiteness, floating interior spaces and thin metal railings
were my first introduction to modern architecture, and they made a strong
impression on me, although I'd never thought to become an architect at
that time. Later, these fantastic visual images had begun gradually to
overlap with images of boats and airplanes, the very symbols of modernity
for children like myself at that time.
Much has been changed since then. Today the
city of Tokyo may be called the world's largest assemblage of industrially
produced artifacts (in materials such as metal, glass, concrete, etc.).
Having witnessed personally this transformation from a garden city to an
industrialized city within the span of a mere fifty years, Tokyo presents
for me a rich mental landscape at an almost surrealistic level.
Tokyo, because of its capacity to meet all
kinds of external demands and pressures for change, is continuously a seductive
and exciting place for the creation of something new. The city simply excites
the minds of architects and artists. At the same time, however, Tokyo stands
as a sober reminder of what one would not do and should not. So many changes
have been enacted in the name of progress but at the expense of the city's
rich cultural legacy. Tokyo, in this respect, continues to serve me as
example and teacher for the navigation of a future course.
Next, I would like to move on to my second
city, Chicago. Following my graduation from the University of Tokyo in
the early 50s, I decided to pursue further graduate study in the U.S. Although
I have never lived in Chicago, throughout those years I spent in the United
States, the city always symbolized for me a city of architectural dreams.
No city possessed a richer collection of what one might call the genuine
heritage of American architecture. The great works of Richardson, Sullivan,
Burnham and Root, and Wright offer a rich panoramic view of American Modernism
of that period. Even to the eyes of a foreigner like myself, the sturdy,
masculine facades of Chicago architecture instantly seemed a mirror of
the fierce, proud individualism that is deeply rooted in American tradition.
In the 50s, Chicago had also welcomed its
new heroes from Europe Mies van der Rohe and Moholy-Nagy — and a new generation
of native architects had emerged in the region. Since I was definitely
a Miesian at that time, I was unforgettably enthralled by my first glimpse
of the Lake Shore Drive Apartments (of Mies), seen against the fast-moving
sky of clouds racing out over Lake Michigan. For my students at Washington
University, I made a visit to Chicago for (at least) three days a prerequisite
for passing my design studio. Every time 1 went to Chicago with them, I
savored the moments of visiting those architectural masterpieces. They
are in my opinion the very expression of collective individualism.
There might be no coincidence that the same
spirited city has given the birth to the two greatest architectural foundations
of our time: the Graham Foundation and The Hyatt Foundation. And by sheer
luck, my architectural career has been blessed by both of these foundations.
1958 was the year when I was selected by the
Graham Foundation to be the recipient of a grant for young architects and
artists. The grant was so generous that I was able to spend the next two
years mostly traveling over Japan, Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East
and both northern and southern Europe. These were fantastic experiences
for a young architect who wished to broaden his understanding on different
cultures, cities and architectures, and to discover certain relationships
between them. There were also a number of people I met during this time,
whose friendship I still cherish today. Among them is my companion of over
thirty years, my wife Misao, here this evening.
The honor given to me by The Hyatt Foundation
this time seems to me again an encouragement to take another voyage to
explore and investigate architecture, and I cannot help feeling the same
excitement I had 35 years ago. How lucky I have been.
Lastly, I would like to talk about Prague
as my third city. I visited the city in 1972, for the first time in my
life. Spending a few days here was enough to be overwhelmed by the beauty
of the city. But the strongest impression I received from the city was,
however, not just one of beauty or powerful scenery; instead it was an
impression of the rich layering of the city's history and culture, the
presence of different times and civilizations manifest at the scale of
towns and districts, approaching the ideal which the architectural historian
Christian Norberg-Schultz has called "the culture of rich multi-layered
complexity." Besides magnificent examples of architecture associated with
different periods, the remarkable juxtaposition (or constellation) of Old
Town, New Town, Small Town, and Hradcany — as well as contemporary districts
— constitutes the whole city and its architectural culture. It is the very
opposite of what Tokyo is today. If one of the most important roles of
the city is to function as a memory apparatus for the people who inhabit
and visit it, Prague would certainly represent an ideal city. This
memory apparatus generates in people's minds both reflection on their culture
and aspiration for its future.
One of the most remarkable reflective remarks
I have come across recently was in an interview with President Havel, given
to Time magazine last year. It was subtitled "Bad Taste and Bad
Politics". According to him, when he entered Prague Castle, the former
seat of Czechoslovakia's Communist regime, he was astounded by the incredibly
bad taste of their paintings on the walls and furnishings in the rooms.
He immediately realized why their governing had been so bad. There he does
not talk about bad or good taste as, let's say, one's ability to choose
neck-ties to match their shirts in the morning. Instead, he calls good
taste one's capacity to understand what other people may think or feel
— in other words, sensitivity to others' feelings. Bad taste is the opposite;
the lack of this sensitivity leads to bad politics.
I was so moved by his remarks that since then
I have been quoting this passage whenever I have had the opportunity. As
an architect, you may be able to say that bad taste leads to bad architecture.
Of course, good taste in itself is not sufficient to determine the design
of buildings and cities; so many other factors are involved, really. In
the sense we are using here, taste has nothing to do with style or ideology,
or even with choosing between two equivalent design strategies, for example.
But as an ever-present guide to the thoughts of the designer, sensitivity
to other human beings and human situations — or its lack — will be evident
in the resulting architecture and will certainly influence whether it will
be deemed good or bad.
I have now described my own involvement with
those three cities; Tokyo, Chicago and Prague. I have found through my
own small crystal ball three important messages behind them, which I repeat:
child fantasy, collective individualism, and concern for humanity and history,
respectively. And I wonder: aren't these also the very essences of modernity?
The further pursuit of this question is precisely my agenda.
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