Fumihiko Maki, an architect who designed many notable buildings in his native Japan and several in the United States, including a new home for MIT’s renowned Media Lab, a university art museum in St. Louis, and Tower 4 of the World Trade Center, died June 6. He was 95.
His death was announced Wednesday in a statement by his firm, Maki and Associates. It provided no other details. Mr.
Maki won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor, in 1993. But of the dozens of Pritzker laureates, he was one of the least known, in part because his buildings were, like the architect himself, soft-spoken and impeccably polite. They had none of the bravado of buildings by Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid or even his countryman Tadao Ando, who used concrete to sometimes thrilling effect.
Advertisement In an interview for this obituary in 2010, Mr. Maki said his goal was not to make his buildings beautiful — an elusive quality, he said — but to delight their users. He succeeded with the MIT Media Lab extension, completed in 2009 in Cambridge to rave reviews.
It abuts at one edge the original Media Lab building, designed by I.M. Pei.
For the extension, Mr. Maki created a series of glass-enclosed spaces that open onto large internal courtyards. Work areas are connected by zigzagging stairways, less steep than normal flights, to encourage scientists to saunter from level to level rather than take elevators.
The goal, he said, was to get people — and ideas — circulating through the buil.