Considered one of the fathers of modern Japanese architecture, Kunio Maekawa was born in 1905. Throughout his long career, Maekawa’s work highlighted a constant tension between Japanese traditional design and European modernism. He studied architecture at Tokyo Imperial University and, upon graduation in 1928, travelled to Paris, working in the studio of Swiss-French architect and leading modernist Le Corbusier alongside Pierre Jeanneret, furniture designer Charlotte Perriand and Alfred Roth. On returning to Japan in 1930, Maekawa worked for five years in the Tokyo office of Czech emigre architect Antonin Raymond, who had settled in Japan to assist Frank Lloyd Wright in the design and construction of the Imperial Hotel (1923). Maekawa established his own office in 1935 and which soon became a focus for young architects like Kenzo Tange to find work.

Maekawa’s own house (1942), gabled roofed and timber clad epitomised his efforts in resolving traditional vernacular architecture with the volumetric aspirations of Corbusian modernism. His collaboration with Junzo Sakakura, another Corbusian disciple, and Junzo Yoshimura on International House, Tokyo (1955) was a brilliant harmonisation of contemporary modern architecture with a traditional Japanese mansion garden. But it was his Corbusian-influenced reinforced concrete civic buildings, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1952) and Tokyo Bunka Kaikan (Tokyo Metropolitan Festival Hall) (1961) in Ueno Park, Tokyo, that drew international praise and secured his position as one of the leaders of postwar Japanese contemporary architecture. For Expo 70 in Osaka, Maekawa & Associates was responsible for the Steel Pavilion for the Japan Iron and Steel Federation. Avoiding association with his younger colleagues’ interests in metabolism and thus securing broad institutional and corporate patronage, Maekawa’s later career was characterised by promotion of an orthodox modernism.

Robin Boyd profiled Maekawa in New Directions in Japanese Architecture, and thought highly of his work, naming him in 1965 alongside Kenzo Tange and Junzo Yoshimura as one of “Three or four star architects with international reputations at the highest level” in an article for The Australian.