TOKIO.- He architect Japanese Fumihiko Maki, winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1993 and designer of one of the torres of the new World Trade Center NY -also known as Zone Zero-, died last week at the age of 95, his agency announced today -June 12- in a statement.
Maki was one of the founders of metabolism, a Japanese avant-garde architecture movement of the 1960s that conceived of buildings as living organisms, with structures that integrated harmoniously into the urban environment, but could also be replaced and modulated like cells.
Architect training
Born in Tokyo on September 6, 1928, Fumihiko Maki learned in Japan from Kenzo Tange, a great master of post-war Japanese architecture and greatly influenced by Le Corbusier.
He continued his training in the United States, where he began his professional career in the 1950s as an architect and teacher.
Returning to Tokyo in 1965, he founded his own architecture studio, Maki and Associates, which he himself defined as his most significant creative project.
“It is still a work perpetually in progress, evolving incessantly, adopting new ideas with the passage of time, thus ensuring its perpetuity,” he said in a statement included in the death statement released by the studio.
Among his many creations around the world is one of the office towers that make up the new World Trade Center complex in New York, rebuilt after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers.
Source: AFP
