During his long career as an architect, Gyo Obata achieved international acclaim for the wide range of major buildings that he designed. He was born to Japanese immigrants on February 28, 1923, in San Francisco. His mother Haruko Obata was a well-established floral designer and his father Chiura Obata became a widely known artist.
“Our house was like a studio, and was always filled with paintings and flowers,” Gyo Obata said years later while recalling his early years in San Francisco’s Japantown community. (This quote was included in Marlene Ann Birkman’s 2010 book Gyo Obata: Architect | Clients | Reflections.)
Obata was heavily influenced by his parents’ artistic endeavors, but he also developed an equally powerful interest in science at a young age. A life-changing moment for him took place when he was only in sixth grade and his mother suggested that he could bring together those strong interests by pursuing a career in architecture.
This career subsequently became a major focus for Obata and, in 1942, he enrolled in the architectural program at the University of California, Berkeley. His studies there, however, were soon upended as a result of the United States’ entry into World War II following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor the previous year. With anti-Japanese hysteria reaching a fever pitch in the United States at the time, Obata and his family were among the thousands of Japanese-Americans targeted for internment.
The night before Obata’s parents (along with his siblings) were relocated to an internment camp in northern California, he boarded a train for St. Louis so that he could attend Washington University and continue his architectural studies there. (This university was the only one in the United States at the time that was accepting Japanese-American students.) Obata was able to avoid internment and leave California because of a special legal authorization that his father had managed to obtain on his behalf.
In 1945, Obata received a bachelor of science degree in architecture from Washington University. He then pursued his graduate studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Obata earned his master of architecture and urban design degree from there in 1946. After serving in the U.S. Army until 1947, Obata found employment as a designer in the Chicago office of the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP. He worked there until 1951, when he returned to St. Louis to serve as a design assistant to architect Minoru Yamasaki.
The projects that both of these Japanese-Americans worked on together included what became the influential passenger terminal at the present-day St. Louis Lambert International Airport. This structure, with its aerodynamic lines and low-slung arches reflecting the overall theme of flight, is now regarded as the forerunner of many of today’s airport terminals worldwide.
In 1955, Obata joined forces with architects George Hellmuth and George Kassabaum to form their own St. Louis-based firm. This firm was originally named Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum and is now known as HOK. Along with being one of the founders of this firm, Obata – through his considerable skills set and ever-growing renown – proved to be instrumental in steadily building it from a regional practice to a global giant. The numerous acclaimed buildings that Obata designed during his time at HOK ultimately included the following aviation infrastructure:
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in Texas;
King Khaled International Airport, which serves Saudi Arabia’s capital city of Riyadh; and
the terminal at Sendai International Airport in the northeastern part of the Japanese island of Honshu.
Obata also designed the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and this building has been widely regarded one of his leading achievements. This museum, which is one of the most-visited in the world, was formally opened on Independence Day in 1976 in commemoration of the United States’ bicentennial. The key features of Obata’s design for this museum include four marble-encased cubes for smaller exhibits; and three large steel-and-glass atria for displays of everything from planes to spacecraft.
Obata died on March 8, 2022, in St. Louis. He was 99. Bill Valentine, whose career as an architect at HOK dates back to 1962, was among those who paid tribute to Obata at the time of his passing. “Gyo embodied everything that’s honorable about the architectural profession,” noted Valentine. “Instead of designing for the fashions of the times or to make a personal statement, Gyo designed to improve lives. He was a kind, thoughtful man who developed warm, personal relationships with his colleagues and clients. People believed in him, which is an essential part of turning drawings into buildings.”
Photo Credit: Serotta07 (licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)
For more information on Gyo Obata, please check out https://www.hok.com/news/2022-03/gyo-obata-founding-partner-at-hok-dies-at-99/
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