Fumihiko Maki, Honored Architect of Understated Buildings, Dies at 95

Fumihiko Maki, an architect who designed many notable buildings in his native Japan and several in the United States, including a new home for M.I.T.’s renowned Media Lab, a university art museum in St. Louis and Tower 4 of the World Trade Center, died on June 6. He was 95.

His death was announced on Wednesday in a statement by his firm, Maki and Associates. It provided no other details.

Mr. Maki won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor, in 1993. But of the dozens of Pritzker laureates, he was one of the least known, in part because his buildings were, like Mr. Maki himself, soft-spoken and impeccably polite. They had none of the bravado of buildings by Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, or even of his countryman Tadao Ando, who used concrete to sometimes thrilling effect.

In an interview for this obituary in 2010, Mr. Maki said his goal was not to make his buildings beautiful — an elusive quality, he said — but to delight their users.

He succeeded with the M.I.T. Media Lab extension, completed in 2009 in Cambridge, Mass., to rave reviews. It abuts at one edge the original Media Lab building, designed by I.M. Pei.