Kunio Maekawa

Double-height living room area featuring furnishings and lighting designed by Maekawa.

The careful balance between traditional and modern design principles in Maekawa's early work is best illustrated by his own home, designed in 1942. The Maekawa House, constructed in wood, has been described as a critical node in his aesthetic development. By bringing piloti inside the house to create a two-story space, while integrating traditional grid formations in the deeply recessed windows, Maekawa deftly combined values borrowed from his European mentors with the vernacular building traditions of Japan.[5] The original house, which was located in Kamiōsaki, has been dismantled and relocated to the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum.[5]

His first major project in the post-war period, the Kinokuniya Bookstore, embodied the spirit of urban renewal and cultural revival amidst the ravaged landscape of war. The two-story wood frame building featured a glass-clad facade facing the street, creating a stark visual and symbolic distinction between the bookshop and its surroundings, the latter of which still largely remained in states of ruin and disarray, dominated by the presence of black markets.[6]^: 39 At the time of its completion, the front area was still obscured by impoverish barracks and slums, and the entrance could only be accessed through a narrow path leading to the door.[6]^: 39 The glass facade filled the flat-roofed building with natural light, while Japanese Ōya stone (a material famously featured in Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel) was used in the entryway and staircase. Through the combination of vernacular materials and new design strategies borrowed from his European mentors, Maekawa began to concretize his neo-traditionalist approach to architecture, negotiating the needs of a modern society ravaged by war, imperial order, and American occupation while probing new ways of refashioning national identity through vernacular tropes and regionalist details.

In the wake of the widespread firebombing of cities across Japan, many Japanese citizens were forced to construct makeshift shelters and barracks out of found materials. Within this context of postwar destruction, Maekawa capitalized on his interest in low-cost, prefabricated housing that had been brewing since his time in Le Corbusier's office.[6]^: 40 While Le Corbusier's concepts for affordable housing, such as the Dom-Ino House, failed to gain traction due to the high costs of actually producing them, Maekawa was inspired by the free plan advocated by Le Corbusier and the modernist visions for urban living and mass production he proposed.[6]^: 40

Maekawa collaborated with aircraft factory San-in Kōgyō (whose owner, Yoshisuke Ayukawa was a client of Maekawa's during the war) and architectural engineer Kaoru Ono to create a production line of prefabricated housing, a project that was dubbed Prefabrication Maekawa Ono San-in Kōgyō, or PREMOS for short.[6]^: 40–41 PREMOS produced approximately 1,000 units, which were made almost exclusively out of wood and mostly used as residences for coal miners in rural Japan, although a few were commissioned as private urban homes by clients and friends of Maekawa.[6]^: 41 None of the PREMOS houses survive today. The houses were supported by L-shaped walls located at the corners of the home, had no columns, and used a collection of floor, ceiling, and partition panels that were all manufactured in the factory before being sent to the building site, where they could be fully constructed within a week.[6]^: 41 Though PREMOS never reached widespread success owing largely to the actual expenses of the construction and the decline of coal mining in the late 1960s (an industry that had peaked during the U.S. occupation due to the operating needs of national industries, particularly steel), the modernist principles demonstrated in the project—combined dining and kitchen spaces, the Western-style living room, the flat-roofed structure, and the mass-production methods—emblematized the flux of the postwar years and allowed Maekawa to test out ideas borrowed from his time working with European architects within a Japanese context.

One of his best-known works, the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan (Tokyo Metropolitan Festival Hall) located in Ueno Park, was commissioned in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the establishment of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in 1956.[7] The building contains a main concert hall, used for ballet, opera, and other large concerts, a smaller recital hall, rehearsal rooms and a music library. The 21,000-square foot complex was designed in conjunction with Junzo Sakakura and Takamasa Yoshizaka, both of whom had also apprenticed under Le Corbusier.[7] The building works in harmony with Le Corbusier's National Museum of Western Art (1959), which the three architects had also worked on, and the Japan Art Academy (1958), both also located within Ueno Park. The three complexes are connected by an extended terrace, and the reinforced concrete and formalist cues echo Le Corbusier's structure without fully replicating its visual cues.[7] The National Museum of Western Art is Le Corbusier's only building in East Asia, featuring an austere concrete facade consisting of a rhythmically organized rectangular panels that become compressed as the eye moves upward, adding to the illusion of height that is further pronounced by the pilotis in the interior and exterior of the building.[4]

Tokyo Bunka Kaikan features a wide-set cornice supported by square pilotis, which continue into the interior of the large entrance hall. The upturned eaves are reminiscent of Le Corbusier's Notre-Dame du Haut, while the wooden acoustic panels of the 2,300-seat main auditorium feature organic, cloud-like forms, counterbalancing the heft and linearity of the concrete details.[8] The smaller Recital Hall, which seats 649 individuals and is used for chamber music performances and smaller recitals, has a sound-reflecting panel that resembles a folding screen hung vertically, as well as sound-diffusing concrete niches that similarly call to mind paper cutouts and folds. Both interior elements were designed by sculptor Masayuki Nagare.[8] The forms of the two halls extend above the level of the roof, creating dynamic hexagonal and triangular prisms that enliven the rectilinear structure.