Architect of Inclusive Spaces
Instead of harboring bitterness for racial discrimination, he designed public buildings for transparency and inclusion.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Raymond Moriyama (RM) was born in Vancouver, Canada. His parents had immigrated from Japan before World War 2, when his father’s brother asked for help with the hardware store he had opened in Vancouver. RM’s father was a schoolteacher and hardware store owner, who was eventually thrown in prison for resisting an order to join a road camp. It would be two years before the family was reunited.
(Editor’s note: Japan attacked the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in the Pacific Ocean on December 7, 1941, a day which U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt said would “live in infamy forever!” As a result, many U.S. and Canadian citizens feared that Japanese – Americans would be more loyal to Japan than to the U.S. and Canada, where they were now living. So, the U.S. and Canadian governments forced everyone of Japanese heritage – adults and children – to live within barbed wire fenced areas located mostly on the West coast of the U.S. and Canada until the war was over several years later.)
After the war, RM’s family moved to another location in Canada, where RM’s father worked as a dishwasher and his mother cleaned houses.
CHILDHOOD
RM never forgot how he and his family were treated by the Canadian government. (Editor’s note: The U.S. government treated Japanese Americans the same way, during the same time.) At age 90, RM discussed his life for a documentary film, recalling the slurs delivered by the Canadian Mounties (police) who came to take his father away. “If you are called an enemy alien as a child of 12, and to be called a ‘goddam Jap,’ it will never leave you.”
A better memory of RM for his age 12 was designing his first building – a treehouse constructed from scavaged lumber and branches near the Slocan River in British Columbia. He built it on the outskirts of a camp where he and his mother and two sisters were interned during World War 2 when more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians were confined in their own country (Canada) after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
RM often said that a childhood accident determined his career: When he was 4, a model airplane he had built flew over a stove with a pot of bubbling stew on top of it. When he tried to retrieve the plane, the pot topped over and he suffered terrible burns. He was confined to bed for 8 months and spent the time looking out the window at the construction going on outside. He was impressed by a man in a suit who showed up every day brandishing sheaves of paper, and who seemed to be in charge. When RM’s father told him that the man was an architect, RM declared that that would be his profession, too.
EDUCATION
RM studied architecture at the University of Toronto on a scholarship and then at McGill University in Montreal. He later earned his Master’s degree in architecture.
ARCHITECTUAL THEME: TRANSPARENCY FOR INCLUSION
RM opened his own architecture firm with $392, the extent of his savings.
His first ‘commission’ (architectural design assignment for pay) was at a local golf course. His first significant commission was the Japanese Canadian Cultural Center, designed to invoke a Japanese temple and to serve as a gathering place for the Japanese Canadian community. Since Japanese Canadians had mostly been imprisoned during the war, with opportunities to get involved in business ventures only after the war was over, few had extra cash to contribute to the cultural center, so a mortgage loan was taken out by 70 Japanese Canadian supporters to help finance construction of the cultural center.
A few years later, when RM’s creative architecture was becoming more well known, he was hired to design the Ontario Science Center, to celebrate Canada’s centennial in 1967. (It took two years to complete construction.) The result was a modernist 500,000 square feet assemblage of concrete shapes lined by bridges and escalators, filled with interactive exhibits, a revolutionary concept at the time.
Despite RM’s personal and family experiences of racial discrimination by government and many individuals, as an architect he made buildings designed to be readily useable for – and appreciated by – common people.
The Scarborough Civil Center – completed in 1973 for a district of Toronto – is a shimmering, 5 story building clad in aluminum and reflective glass, with an interior atrium ringed by open-plan office spaces that had vines hanging from their balconies. RM’s design plan was to make the government accessible to the people. What was originally the mayor’s office, on the ground floor, has a circular window, offering a metaphor for transparency and also, RM joked, providing easy access to disgruntled citizens.
“If it’s a bad administration,” RM said in a video documentary, “you could throw a brick right through it.”
After RM was chosen to design the new home of the Canadian War Museum, he collaborated with another Canadian architect who had grown up in Belfast, Ireland, its own kind of war zone historically with the government of Great Britain. RM noted the irony of now working on a war museum after he and his family had been imprisoned during the war for no crime, but only based on their ancestral heritage.
While designing the war museum, RM recalled “discovering as a child that democracy is fragile, which I had thought about until going to university, and maybe even into university, that you’ve got to fight for the rights of everybody, not just yourself.” So, RM’s war museum design included a painting of a shell-shocked soldier, an audio re-creation of the writings of a Loyalist child refugee escaping the American Revolution, and a teddy bear once carried by a Canadian Army stretcher bearer killed in World War 1, given to him by his daughter as a good-luck charm.
CHALLENGE – CRITICS
Critics of the unique Science Center’s configuration jeered, likening its participatory features – including a planetarium and an amateur radio station – to a carnival and judging them unsuitable for a museum. But the public loved it and in 2007, it was memorialized on a postage stamp.
INCLUDE CREATIVE THINKERS IN BUSINESS
One of RM’s later business partnerships included – among their staff of 11 – a political scientist and an architect whose background was in philosophy. In this way, RM was literally demonstrating his ability and willingness to “think outside the box.”
CAREER SATISFACTION
In addition to the respect for RM’s designs leading to being chosen for so many significant public buildings, RM is widely recognized as one of the greatest Canadian architects of the 20th and early 21st century.
RM was noted for his ability to listen to his clients. He often described himself as a “professional dumdum” – a dogged conversationalist whose questions led to some extraordinary structures and at least once, to no structure at all. When a prominent lawyer and his wife asked RM to design a house for them,” he recalled, “I listened for 40 minutes and found out they had nice homes and many, many cars and a cottage and boats and all the rest. So, I told them, OK, you don’t need an architect, you need family counseling, because an architect can’t fuse you together.”
Editor: One way to assess career satisfaction is when you have the financial security to decline working with people whose goals are not consistent with your moral compass or vision of how you can be helpful. Examples include a lawyer unwilling to argue for a client who has not been fully truthful to at least the lawyer; a minister declining to marry a couple who can’t agree on how to raise any children; a real estate agent who learns that the potential buyer wants to use the property for illegal drug sales; a plumber who declines to set up gas piping for the homeowner to avoid paying the gas company.
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This career story is based on an obituary written by Penelope Green, published within The New York Times on September 21, 2023.
