Test your design IQ
Who is the Pritzker prizewinning Japanese architect known for his contemporary urban architecture and spaces of public appearance like the Center for Arts in the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco and the Floating Pavilion in Groninen?
MANILA, Philippines - He was born on Sept. 5, 1928 in Tokyo. After studying at the University of Tokyo, he moved to the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and then the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
In 1956, he took a post as assistant professor of architecture in Washington University in St. Louis, where he was also awarded his first commission: the design of Steinberg Hall at the university’s Danforth Campus.
Awarded a Graham Foundation Fellowship in 1958, he went on two extensive research trips to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and northern and southern Europe. Impressed by the formal and spatial organization of settlements, particularly the communities along the Mediterranean coast, he became interested in collective forms.
After working for prestigious US architectural firms in the 1950s, he returned to Japan in the 1960s where he established is own design company. It was also at this time that he became part of the Metabolist Movement, a group of ambitious postwar Japanese architects who advocated the embrace of new technology with a concomitant belief in architecture’s organic, humanist qualities.
Among his renowned early works was the Hillside Terrace Apartment Complex in Tokyo, which was realized in six phases between 1969 and 1992. The residential and commercial project features a unified architectural style on an intimate human scale, with sidewalks and transitional spaces providing pedestrian access to shops and preserving privacy for the apartments on the upper levels.
His preference for collaged and fragmentary composition, similar to the layered spaces of traditional Japanese architecture and gardens can best be seen in the Spiral Building in Tokyo (1985) which pays tribute to 20th century architecture and Cubist Art. The facade of the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, on the other hand, features an orthogonal pattern in tune with the traditional grid of the city as well as asymmetry with the surrounding neoclassical buildings.
Apart from his use of metal and glass, his designs are known for his masterful use of light, especially in the Graduate School Research Center at Keio University, which has a transparent entrance wall and brise-soliet of perforated aluminum panels. The Tokyo Church of Christ, on the other hand, features a shop-like translucent wall of light in the main hall, providing a place for spiritual reflection.
He was also done extensive work outside Japan: the Ensemble Global Gate in Dusseldorf, Republic Polytechnic in Singapore, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and Walker Hall in Washington University, the Delegation of Ismaili Imamamt in Ottawa, Building Square 3 at the Novartis Campus in Switzerland, and the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1993, he received the prestigious Pritzker Prize in Prague Castle. After completing a $330 million expansion of the United Nations building in Manhattan, he is currently designing Tower 4 at the former World Trade Center site, as well as an extension for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s media lab.
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Last week’s question: Who is the French chef whose self-named hotel restaurant in Aubrac has three Michelin stars and was voted the 7th best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine?
Answer: Michel Bras
Winner: Jovito Malundas of Lucena City
