Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The architect Fumihiko Maki died in June at the age of 95, just before the opening of his Reinhard Ernst Museum. It might seem curious that this Pritzker Prize-winning architect, who built the much-lauded MIT Media Lab, a New York skyscraper and was also building for the UN in Manhattan, should have his legacy defined by a building in the modest German city of Wiesbaden.But it is also, perhaps, appropriate. For all that Maki built a career at the very centre of modern architecture, from his role in founding the Japanese movement of Metabolism in the 1960s to his exquisitely minimal Tower Four at the World Trade Center — by some distance the best new commercial building on Ground Zero — he was a modest, quiet man. He never sought to develop an immediately recognisable style or build a cult of personality. As a result, he slipped through the net, widely admired in the profession but not much known beyond it.An elegant, pure structure that’s also somewhat slippery and difficult to pin down, the new €85mn museum, built to house one of Germany’s most illustrious personal collections, might make a perfect epitaph.The Reinhard Ernst collection is unusual in that it concentrates entirely on postwar abstract art, mainly American, European and Japanese. Ernst — a businessman who sold his precision engineering company to focus on collecting — had worked with Maki before, having commissioned him to design a community centre in Natori, Japan. So when he came to build a new museum in his adopted hometown, he approached the architect (by now a friend) again.The result is a striking white stone building that resembles a sculpture made from giant sugar cubes. It looks about as abstract as an architecture could be. There is no hint of the reality of construction; even the joints in the stone cladding have had stone dust rubbed into them so they seem to disappear. As you approach, it resembles one of those enigmatic, white-walled houses you occasionally stumble upon in a Tokyo street. It seems totally autonomous, unconcerned with its architectural context — part of which is the old Wiesbaden Museum next door, a stolid block with a classical portico. But that’s deceptive, says Ernst, pointing me towards a building opposite as we walk through the space: “Look how Maki took those proportions and mirrored them here. They line up.” Inside, you find yourself in a world of white. The spaces are flooded with natural light — from above, from the sides, from courtyards, atria and skylights. Your eye is drawn towards a few striking works, including Tony Cragg’s seven-metre-high sculpture “Pair”, two tottering stacks of gold, and Bettina Pousttchi’s pillar-box-red “Vertical Highways — Progressions 4”, constructed from crushed, reshaped motorway crash barriers. At the centre of the building, a courtyard — vaguely Japanese in style and adorned with a single, delicate-looking maple tree — accommodates a chunky piece by Eduardo Chillida, a group of folded Corten steel plates and looking a little like a family of weird chairs. The piece was so heavy that the floor had to be reinforced, Ernst tells me, with apparent pride. If there’s a lot of circulation space — a profligacy that might not have happened in a publicly funded museum — for Ernst this is very much part of the appeal. Remarkably, the building is open only to school groups until midday each day; kids seem to relish the endless lobbies, big sculptures and the spaces in between.While less imposing, the galleries themselves are generous, if somehow a little frictionless. The resistance is provided by the art, which is colourful and mostly wonderful. One of the world’s largest collections of Helen Frankenthaler is given only a little exposure, but even what’s on show is great. There is also Robert Motherwell, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Lee Krasner, Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, much more. You find an entire gallery devoted to Frank Stella’s remarkable “Moby Dick” works, frantic, swirling wall sculptures that attempt to capture the roiling sea and the mad obsession of the chase. Reflecting Ernst’s links with Japan, also present are numerous canvases by artists including Shōzō Shimamoto, Tōkō Shinoda, Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka and Inoue Yūichi — epic, striking pieces all. Pollock and Richter might be slimly represented, and Rothko and Still absent altogether (“too expensive”, says Ernst, and fair enough), but arguably that makes the museum interesting. It doesn’t attempt a narrative of abstraction but certain ideas do emerge: the relationship between the body and physicality, engagement with materials, the line, calligraphy and so on. There is no attempt at the encyclopedic; this is unapologetically the collection of one man — and a man who clearly loves colour. Perhaps the only thing that is missing in this elegant new building is a clear sense of the architect himself. For the museum’s opening, a show on Maki’s work has been mounted, showcasing key projects such as 4 World Trade Center, Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum (2014), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in California (1993) and the National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto (1986). Yet it misses more interesting, idiosyncratic projects such as his early Kaze-no-Oka crematorium, an enigmatic landscape of memory and containment that makes death seem altogether uplifting and mysterious. That some of Maki’s best buildings were corporate — glassy, slick, shiny, effective — probably didn’t help his profile. Yet somehow his works never quite amounted to an oeuvre; even if they might be individually excellent, each appears as an effort to address a particular place, site or client. It’s an unexpected thing, to be missing from your own monograph. Yet perhaps that’s precisely what architects should sometimes aim to do, especially in a museum — to work well, then to disappear and allow the contents to shine.museum-re.deFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
