10 Facts About Kunio Maekawa

Kunio Maekawa was a Japanese architect and a key figure in Japanese postwar modernism.

Kunio Maekawa is especially known for the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Kunio Maekawa was born in 1905 in Niigata Prefecture in Japan.

Kunio Maekawa came from a privileged background, and possessed samurai heritage on both sides of the family; his paternal grandfather was a retainer of the Ii clan, while his maternal relatives were retainers of the Tsugaru clan.

Kunio Maekawa entered the prestigious First Tokyo Middle School in 1918, and in 1925 enrolled in the Department of Architecture at Tokyo Imperial University.

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Kunio Maekawa participated in projects including the unbuilt Cite Mondiale center—an expansion upon the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva and a utopian vision conceptualized to hold Paul Otlet's Universal Decimal Classification Collection—the Louise-Catherine barge project by Madeleine Zillhardt, and The Salvation Army in Paris.

Kunio Maekawa drew influence from Raymond's expressive use of reinforced concrete, and Raymond in turn was affected by the vernacular tropes in Le Corbusier's work as filtered through Maekawa's Japanese sensibilities.

The Kunio Maekawa House, constructed in wood, has been described as a critical node in his aesthetic development.

Kunio Maekawa himself had, at times, been regarded as unpatriotic during the wartime years owing to his interest in Le Corbusier's non-historicist, proto-Brutalist concrete designs.

Kunio Maekawa collaborated with aircraft factory San-in Kogyo and architectural engineer Kaoru Ono to create a production line of prefabricated housing, a project that was dubbed Prefabrication Kunio Maekawa Ono San-in Kogyo, or PREMOS for short.