Maekawa, Kunio (1905–1986)

Japanese architect. One of the pioneers of modern architecture in Japan, he was strongly influenced by the international style of the French architect Le Corbusier and placed a Brutalist emphasis on rough concrete exteriors.

Training Maekawa was born in Niigata, northwest Honshu Island, and studied at Tokyo University. He worked in Paris 1928–30 in the office of Le Corbusier, who had a profound effect on the development of his style. The second major influence was that of Antonin Raymond (1889–1976), in whose Tokyo office he worked 1930–35. A pupil of Le Corbusier, Raymond was a Czechoslovak architect who had settled permanently in Japan, and it was from him that Maekawa acquired a more sensitive understanding of traditional Japanese styles.

Career Maekawa began private practice in 1935, his first commissions uncompromisingly modernist. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a period of intense nationalism in Japan, his works were condemned as examples of ‘Western decadence’, and he received few commissions. His designs were perfectly suited, however, to the post-war reconstruction of Japan, and from the 1950s onward he built a wide range of civic buildings, many of them characterized by his confident use of raw concrete and the subtle adaptation of elements of Japanese architecture. Among his most important and influential buildings are the Harumi apartment complex, Tokyo 1958, the first high-rise block of flats in Japan; the Festival Hall, Tokyo 1961, one of the outstanding buildings of modern Japan; and the Ishigaki Municipal Auditorium, Ishigaki Island, southwest of Okinawa, 1986.

His example inspired a generation of young Japanese architects, most notably Kenzo Tange.