Biography
Obata was born and raised in San Francisco. Due to his family's Japanese heritage, he was nearly interned with other Japanese-Americans during World War II. Though his family was sent to an internment camp, he avoided it by leaving the School of Architecture at the University of California-Berkeley to study architecture at Washington University in St. Louis the only University in the United States willing to accept Japanese nationals at that time. He earned his bachelor of architecture degree here in 1945.
He then studied under master Finnish architect Eero Saarinen at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, receiving his master's degree in architecture and urban design in 1946.
After serving in the U.S. Army from 1946–1947 and working as an architect in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill from 1947–1951, Obata returned to St. Louis in 1951 to join the firm of Minoru Yamasaki, designer of the World Trade Center towers. Four years later, in 1955, he joined architects George Hellmuth and George Kassabaum in establishing the St. Louis-based architecture firm Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum.
Due in part to Obata's prowess and growing reputation, the firm achieved global renown, and Obata himself has won numerous awards for his designs. Today, HOK has more than 1,800 employees in 23 offices worldwide.
In 2010, Obata was featured in a book written by Marlene Ann Birkman and published by The Images Publishing Group titled, Gyo Obata: Architect | Clients | Reflections. The book features 30 of Obata's projects (and clients) spanning five decades.
Obata's design philosophy is "to provide spaces which are not only functional, but also enhance the quality of life for those who work and live in them." In Gyo Obata: Architect | Clients | Reflections, he says that, "The language that architects use to define space is daylight. Each project offers new potential for discovery, for understanding the site and program, and an opportunity to do a thoughtfully designed building that will bring meaning and enjoyment to the people who will occupy it."
Read more about this topic: Gyo Obata
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)