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The jury met at Shenzhen (People's Republic of China), on January 30 and 31, 1993, and awarded the Gold Medal to Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki.
Fujisawa Municipal Gymnasium, Japan, Fumihiko MAKI architect.
Born in 1928, Fumihiko Maki studied architecture at the University of Tokyo, from which he graduated in 1952. He continued his education in the United States where he obtained a Masters degree from Cranbrook Academy in 1953, and another from Harvard University in 1954. He worked as an architect with S.O.M. and Luis Sert, and taught in the United States until 1965, when he founded his own firm in Tokyo.
Since then, he has consistently realised prestigious edifices in his home country, the USA, South America, Malaysia, Germany, and Poland. Embarking upon greatly varied projects, from the most simple to the most complex, with the same good-humour and virtuosity, he rapidly earned the esteem of his peers and the critics, in Japan and around the world. Playing with geometrical art in a poetic register, with consummated constructive rigor, he designed with the same ease and mastery a low-cost housing complex (Lima 1972), a luxurious residence (Kuro-be 1983), and a vast sports complex (Fujisawa 1985).
Fervent supporter of modernism, Fumihiko Maki expresses himself in a very personal style. "Modernism, he writes, finds its meaning in the intelligent use of new materials, structural concepts, and construction techniques. Architecture is one of the most representative visual manifestations of the actual state of technological advancement of our society."
The 1993 Gold Medal was officially presented to Fumihiko Maki during the opening ceremony of the XVIII UIA Congress which took place in Chicago, June 17, 1993.