Kiyonori Kikutake

Kiyonori Kikutake was born on 1 April 1928 in Kurume, in Fukuoka Prefecture, the son of a landowner. As a teenager he already won the competition for his town's railway station. A graduate of Waseda University in 1950, he spent two years at Takenaka and then at the Murano-Mori office, and opened his own studio in 1953, which took the name Kikutake Kiyonori Architectural Office in 1962.

He made his name in 1958 with his own house in Tokyo, Sky House: a square reinforced-concrete living space, capped with a shell-structure roof, raised on slab-like columns standing on its four sides. The kitchen and the children's rooms are elements that can be replaced or added, the "Movenet". In 1960, at the World Design Conference in Tokyo, he founded the Metabolist group with Kishō Kurokawa, Fumihiko Maki and others, for whom cities and buildings must evolve like organisms; as early as 1958 he imagined a floating "Marine City". His three-stage design method, "ka, kata, katachi", dates from 1963, and his book "Theory of Metabolic Architecture" (代謝建築論) from 1969.

He used reinforced concrete in a form taken from tradition as well: at the administrative building of Izumo Shrine (1963), which won him in 1964 the prize of the Architectural Institute of Japan and the Pan-Pacific award of the American Institute of Architects. At Yonago, the Tōkōen hotel (1964) hangs two floors from a beam carried by six columns, facing the white-sand and pine coast of Yumigahama and Mount Daisen. In Matsue he designed for Shimane Prefecture a museum (1958), a library of exposed concrete whose zigzag walls, set at 45 degrees to the glass, leave the view of the castle hill open (1968), a martial arts hall (1970) and, in 1999, the art museum on the shore of Lake Shinji, whose large titanium roof stays low so as not to hide the mountains.

He also designed the Expo '70 tower in Osaka (1970) and Aquapolis (1975), at the Okinawa ocean exposition, then the Edo-Tokyo Museum (1993) and, with Kume Sekkei, the Kyushu National Museum (2004), in a barrel-shaped volume 160 metres by 80. For the Japanese government he designed war memorials abroad, at Rabaul (1980), Attu (1987) and Sakhalin (1996); the one at Attu is an assembly of titanium triangular pyramids. In 2005 he was one of the general producers of the Aichi Expo, whose site plan he drew. Awarded the Order of the Rising Sun in 2006, teacher of Toyo Ito and Itsuko Hasegawa, he died in Tokyo on 26 December 2011. Sky House was designated an Important Cultural Property in 2025.