Raymond Moriyama, Canadian architect who designed Ontario Science Centre, dead at 93
CBC
Raymond Moriyama, the Canadian architect who built his first structure in a B.C. internment camp during the Second World War and went on to design some of Canada's most iconic buildings, has died at the age of 93.
Moriyama died on Friday, according to a statement from his firm, Moriyama & Teshima Architects. A cause of death has not been released.
"We ask for particular respect and privacy for Raymond's family. The world has lost a visionary architect and they have lost a treasured loved one," the statement said.
Born in Vancouver in 1929, Moriyama had a hand in the creation of the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa's City Hall, the Bata Shoe Museum, the Toronto Reference Library, the Ontario Science Centre and the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo.
Moriyama founded his architecture firm in 1958, according to the firm's website, and later joined with Ted Teshima in 1970 to form Moriyama & Teshima Architects.
He was named a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2009, the same year he won the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Moriyama was one of the greatest Canadian architects of the 20th and early 21st century, if not the greatest, according to Stefan Novakovic, a senior editor at architecture publication Azure Magazine.
"The era in which he sort of came of age and started designing was what we sometimes look at as a sort of golden age of Canadian architecture after World War II," Novakovic said.
"It was this time when we were transforming Canada from this sort of white colonial nation into the multicultural and diverse country that we know today."
That transformation included a desire to express the shift architecturally, which he said Moriyama's buildings do well.
"With Moriyama's buildings, the really beautiful thing is, you don't have to know much, you just have to feel it. You step into the Toronto Reference Library and you feel that this is an inclusive space where everybody's welcome," Novakovic said.
When it comes to the Ontario Science Centre, Moriyama innovated what a museum could be, said Richard M. Sommer, the former dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.
Before the science centre, Sommer said "museums were very, very static and very much about displays and reading. And this is a museum where people were asked to kind of engage very haptically in the material."
The science centre was also the building that launched Moriyama's career, Sommer said.
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This First Person column is written by Melinda Maldonado, who lives in Toronto. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
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