Kunio Maekawa

Kunio Maekawa was born in Niigata in 1905. After graduating in architecture from Tokyo Imperial University in 1928, he left at once for Paris, where he trained in Le Corbusier's atelier. Back in 1930, he joined Antonin Raymond's office, then set up his own practice in 1935. In 1945 an air raid destroyed his Ginza office and his house in Hongō. He met Le Corbusier again in 1951 at the CIAM and helped carry out the National Museum of Western Art in Ueno (1959), the work of his former master, inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2016.

His firm describes three phases in his approach: until the 1950s, light and industrialised building; from the late 1950s into the 1960s, concrete left bare from the formwork, as at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan (1961); then, in answer to the decay of concrete, a method in which tiles are fixed to the formwork and bonded into the concrete, which gives the Niigata City Art Museum (1985) and the Hirosaki City Museum their colour. In his public buildings he gave great weight to the square and the lobby, meeting places that turn the building into a small town; one of his principles holds that architecture should "follow the place where it stands".

This attention to the site shows in his museums. In Hirosaki, the town of his mother's family, he left eight buildings, from the Kimura Institute (1932), his first work, to the 1983 crematorium; his city museum, built within the castle grounds, opens its lobby onto tall trees and a castle turret, a view he wanted to show. In Niigata, the 1985 museum rises on dune terrain, facing a park that recalls the town's canals and willows. His only skyscraper, the Tokio Marine building in Tokyo (1974, 25 storeys), was raised to free a square open to the public; it has since been demolished to make way for a new building. In Germany he designed the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne (1977), grouped around an inner Japanese garden.

Honoured with the UIA's Auguste Perret Prize in 1963, the Architectural Institute of Japan's grand prize in 1968 and the Mainichi Art Prize in 1972, he died in 1986. His firm, which bears his name, has renovated several of his buildings.