A few weeks ago we posted that the noted Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki had died. He was a master of understatement: “One of the greatest, not flamboyant or dominating, flexible and attentive to program, lightly post-modern, always with beautiful results.” In retrospect, we can group him with a number of other architects whose careers peaked in the 80s and 90s of the 20th Century, and who adapted modern architecture to the then prevalent Post Modernism without ever capitulating. Their buildings were emphatically modern, yet skillfully adapted both to the historical city on one hand, and the natural environment on the other. It was a humble architecture that respected the existing man-made and natural context, and far more compelling in its physical presence than the paper thin, attention grabbing work of today’s starchitects. An architecture for all time.
I am thinking of four architects in particular: Maki from Japan (though educated in the US with plenty of work here), Romaldo Giurgola, a Roman architect who taught at Penn and Columbia, and founded his firm in Philadelphia, Raphael Moneo, a Spaniard, who taught at Harvard, again with plenty of work in the US, and Vittorio Gregotti, an Italian from Milan, whose work is concentrated in the nation of his birth.
Pictured are the following: 1. Giurgola, the Parliament House of Australia, Canberra, 2 Giurgola, the MIT Health Services Building, Cambridge, 3. Maki, the Annenberg Center at U. Penn, Philadelphia, 4. Maki, the Spiral Building, Tokyo, 5. Gregotti, the church of Saint Massimiliano Kobe in Bergamo, 6. Gregotti, the Bicocca complex for Pirelli in Milan, 7. Moneo, the Miro Foundation in Palma di Mallorca, and 8, Moneo, The National Museum of Roman Art in Merida.