The Annenberg Public Policy Center community celebrates the life of Fumihiko Maki, the 1993 Pritzker Prize-winning architect who designed APPC’s innovative four-story, glass-and-wood home on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Maki, who was 95 years old, died June 6.
“When I asked how he would ensure that the proposed Annenberg Public Policy Center building would relate to the Annenberg School next door,” recalled APPC director Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Maki replied, ‘I will make sure that the Policy Center smiles at the school.’”
With its open stairwells and glass-enclosed exterior, Maki not only gave Penn a signature building but created a home for APPC whose architecture symbolized the center’s mission of creating cross-campus collaboration.
On November 4, 2009, the building was dedicated at a ceremony with Maki, Jamieson, Penn President Amy Gutmann, Annenberg School for Communication Dean Michael X. Delli Carpini, and Diane Deshong, daughter of Leonore Annenberg, at which portraits were unveiled of former Ambassadors Walter and Leonore Annenberg, the center’s founders.
Following the dedication, Maki delivered the fourth annual Leonore Annenberg Lecture in Public Service and Global Understanding on “Making the Annenberg Public Policy Center: From Concept to Realization,” in which he described his architectural philosophy.
According to the Daily Pennsylvanian, Maki said the building’s color and design are used to transition from the glass exterior of the new building to the exterior of the older Annenberg School for Communication and surrounding architecture. “When talking about the DNA of the building, it really is made of venustas — venustas is Latin for beauty,” Maki told the student newspaper. “However, when I translate it, I like to think of it as delight, which is what I believe this building is doing for Penn’s campus with its design.”
On its website, Maki & Associates says the building’s “material palette of layered glass and wood complements nearby buildings, while still presenting a modern and open image of warm transparency.”
At the building’s dedication, Jamieson said the policy center and Annenberg School are “among Walter and Lee Annenberg’s most important legacies at Penn. Our beautiful new building realizes her dream that the Policy Center have a permanent home in the heart of the Penn campus adjoining the Annenberg School. As we dedicate the building, we rededicate ourselves to the mission they set for us: creating research that makes a difference in the life of the nation and its citizens. By doing so, we honor their vision and memory.”
