Maki and Associates is an internationally recognized architectural firm based in Tokyo, Japan and involved in projects worldwide. The firm was founded in 1965, and provides comprehensive architectural design services ranging from urban design and master planning, site planning and feasibility studies, facilities programming, architectural building and facade design, and interior design (including furniture, graphics, and lighting). The firm's portfolio also includes renovations, restorations, and adaptive re-use of historic structures.
Maki and Associates is actively led by its founder and principal, Fumihiko Maki. The firm has forty staff members comprised of urban designers, architects, and administrative personnel. Mr. Maki remains directly involved with every project, and is assisted by a core team of architects that services each project from beginning to end―conceptual planning through construction. This team approach and continuity is instrumental in achieving a full integration of the client's requirements with the various planning, design, technical, economic, and legal parameters that surround any building endeavor, large or small. The size and structure of the firm―along with the wide range of experience gained through over 50 years of building―allow Maki and Associates to take on complex work of virtually any program and scale.
The firm's portfolio is diverse, including government, institutional, and private sector projects―both domestic and international. Recent work in the United States, Canada, Singapore, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Germany, and China are witness to the firm's ability to adapt not only to a variety of building types and scales, but also to execute projects of high quality outside of Japan.
Regardless of scope or locale, our first concern in any project is the creation of spaces where certain human activities are both physically and mentally enhanced, and where a sense of public character may develop. Those spaces then begin to acquire a kind of symbolic presentation in abstract architectural form. Available technology and appropriate building materials are then investigated simultaneously, and the project takes on a dimension of time as it begins to resolve these issues. The refinement of form and space continues down to precise architectural details, which, as primary building elements, are essential to the spirit of the whole.
More than any question of style, this kind of evolutionary approach to architectural design―layering issues of space, use, form, technology, materials, and detail over one another in sequence―constitutes the essence of modernism, and provides a fertile ground for our present and future explorations in architecture.
