Architect Homes: Joseph Fujikawa
Continuing my never-ending journey on writing about architect residences located across Chicagoland, which started with Philip Will of the architectural firm Perkins & Will back in June. It’s no surprise that a disciple of Mies van der Rohe lived in a stark, modernist home. When it was completed in 1972, architect Joseph Fujikawa had 25 years of working directly with his mentor, absorbing the lessons of the Miesian philosophy that he carried with him the rest of his life. Fujikawa’s colleagues recalled that he “wanted to be more like Mies than Mies himself.”1
Born in Los Angeles in 1922, Joseph Fujikawa was in the middle of his studies in architecture at the University of Southern California during World War II when he was taken from the west coast to a relocation camp in Colorado due to his Japanese ancestry.2 Even after that experience Fujikawa joined the Army, translating Japanese for the final two years of the war. During this time Fujikawa read his first book on modern architecture, The International Style by Philip Johnson and Henry Russell-Hitchcock, that had a huge impact on him. So the young man moved to Chicago where he completed both his bachelor and master degrees at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). It ended up being a life-changing decision. Fujikawa never returned to California and decided to work for his teacher and mentor, Mies van der Rohe, ultimately becoming a partner in the architectural firm. Six years after Mies’ death in 1969 the office’s name was officially changed to Fujikawa Conterato Lohan Associates.
As I wrote in September, Bruno Conterato was also one of the architects that would take over Mies’ firm alongside Fujikawa. They both heavily adopted the Miesian style that had first started when they were IIT students in the 1940s. Fujikawa said the most important lesson he learned from Mies was knowing the materials. “The curriculum that Mies set up, because you learned all these things—how wood goes together, how you build with steel, concrete, brick, masonry, all these materials. With that as a foundation, then you can go out and design a proper building, a building that will hang together.”3 Mies was a very informal teacher, usually taking his students out to dinner for lamb chops at Marx’s Restaurant near the Berghoff on Adams Street in the Loop. While working on the Edith Farnsworth House, his young proteges would enjoy picnics with both their mentor and wealthy client in Plano along the Fox River.
Joseph Fujikawa had always wanted to design and build his own home. So after living in an apartment Hyde Park with his wife Grace and family, the Fujikawas moved to the North Shore for their children Liz and Steve, mainly for the better schools but also due to its accessibility by train to the city, closeness to Lake Michigan, and overall beauty.4 Submitting his plans for a new home to the village of Winnetka in 1971, Fujikawa’s daughter Liz believed her father had been influenced by Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion and Farnsworth House.5 But I feel like Fujikawa’s personal residence has more in common with the 1950s townhouses by I.M. Pei and Harry Weese that he would have seen on a daily basis when he lived in Hyde Park.
Among blocks of traditional Colonial and Tudor Revival residential designs near Sheridan Road in suburban Winnetka is a severe-looking pale brick home with a single window in the middle and a two-story wall of glass that opens to the backyard. Although Fujikawa had worked on Mies’ Crown Hall and Promontory Apartments, he said that designing his own home was “a traumatic experience” and agreed it was easier to build a skyscraper than a residence because a house is like “a personal emotion.”6
Inside Fujikawa celebrated the Miesian aesthetic of clean-lined simplicity and love of good materials. There is a black granite fireplace set beneath a row of wood panels. The staircase is a set of terrazzo treads on steel supports, so lightweight they perfectly blend with the rest of the white interior. The three bedrooms on the upper level share a wide terrace, while a family room on the lower level opens up to a concrete patio and a garden originally landscaped by Fujikawa himself. Because the home is below grade, the backyard feels like “a sheltering cove.”7
Neighbors remembered “Joe” Fujikawa as a quiet, unassuming man who would take the 7:08 train every day from the city to the Indian Hill station where he would walk home to have dinner with his family.8 The enclosed yard provided a peaceful oasis for the architect who usually would spend his time trimming the branches of trees while his wife Grace groomed or played with their shaggy sheep dogs. Fujikawa served on Winnetka’s Architecture Committee and Zoning Board of Appeals (I can only guess what he would think of it now with all the teardowns?) and designed buildings like Roberto Clemente High School in Chicago before he started his own firm Fujikawa Johnson in 1982. They would go on to design such notable buildings as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange at 20 S. Wacker Drive and Two Illinois Center at 233 N. Michigan Ave.
Joseph Fujikawa died of kidney failure on New Year’s Eve 2003 at the age 81. His wife Grace continued to reside in their beloved Winnetka home. Liz and Steve Fujikawa put it on the real estate market for the first time after their mother’s passing five years ago. It sold for $725,000 in December 2019 to new owners who claimed to “like it just as it is” and were planning to make only minor changes.9 But when I checked on the home earlier this year I saw additions to the side of the home. Although I mourn the loss of the original front window and the symmetry of Fujikawa’s overall design, it seems like the renovation is being sensitively done in consideration of the Miesian look. The original square footage was just under 3500, which isn’t small by any means. But this is the North Shore we’re talking about where homes are usually double that size. The home’s jagged driveway and extra garage is off-putting but it could be a lot worse. At least the new owners didn’t lie about “liking” the home and completely tear it down like a Keck & Keck design in Glencoe back in 2020. So I can’t complain too much and I’m just happy to see Fujikawa’s personal residence is still with us, even in its new renovated form.
Chicago Architects Oral History Project: Interview with Joseph Fujikawa, 1983.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Chicago Architects Oral History Project: Interview with Joseph Fujikawa, 1983.