Quiet Cool
Inside the gentlest creative mind in St. Louis
Photograph by Whitney Curtis
(page 1 of 3)
Pop quiz: Who’s responsible for the graphic identity or environmental design of the following projects?
• Great Rivers Greenway, the largest green space master-planning project in the nation
• MetroLink
• The new Busch Stadium
• Coors Field in Denver
• Shakespeare Festival St. Louis
• The Washington Avenue Loft District
• The eastern extension of the Delmar Loop
• Grand Avenue in Milwaukee
• The Indiana Avenue Cultural District in Indianapolis
• The Mall of America
• A Starbucks urban prototype
• The award-winning Madrid Xanadú and a nine-story mall in Yokosuka, Japan
(Hint: It’s an Obata. And not Gyo.)
Now retired, architect Gyo Obata, one of the founders of the international design firm HOK, was a formidable talent and a formidable father. His firstborn, Kiku Obata, grew up careful, quiet and perfect, as competitive as her father but far calmer. She, too, founded her own company, starting with graphic design and then integrating architecture and interior, landscape, lighting and environmental design—just as her father had. Unlike Gyo, though, she used the most soft-spoken, almost countercultural business practices imaginable: stayed deliberately behind the scenes, kept titles off the firm’s business cards, shied away from celebrity.
Now, at 57, she’s questioning her approach—just a little. When she turned 50, she started trusting the odd coincidences and intuitions that have been hiding all this time, tucked into the coils of her supremely rational brain. Then she started wondering if she might accomplish more if she were more direct, more forceful, more outspoken. She forced herself to socialize by convincing herself she’d meet at least one interesting person at every event. She even resolved to do some of the public speaking she’d always avoided.
But don’t expect her to raise her voice.
Kiku’s passionate about a lot (good design, politics, urban life, the environment) but so self-contained, you’d never know it. Her ego must eat alone in its room—it never cries to be fed, and when it is, it immediately cuts pieces to share. Kiku’s two grown daughters say they’ve never seen her overwhelmed or frazzled. Her brother, Gen Obata, can’t think of anything that makes her angry; her sister, Nori Obata, says maybe when the Cardinals lose.
After a couple of interviews with Kiku wearing a black Chanel suit of the thinnest wool, all electronics silenced, interruptions nonexistent and every comment thoughtful (no sense of haste, no blurted or tactless comments, no groping for the right word), you start to fantasize about seeing her with a really lousy head cold, trumpeting sneezes and spewing phlegm. Or hearing her sputter something ridiculous because she’s too mad to think straight. Or watching her screw something up royally.
Instead she remains serenely controlled, right and left hemispheres perfectly balanced. She works 80-hour weeks and enjoys every minute. To relax, she does maddening, near-insoluble puzzles—and she’ll stay up all night to solve them. She loves crunching numbers, and she’s a shrewd, if self-effacing, marketer. She gathers inspiration everywhere: photographing building facades and quirky signs; attending the Aspen Ideas Festival every year to hear challenging ideas about economics, technology, design, science, history and art; reading The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Wear Daily, W, The Sartorialist and David Sedaris.
“I have an insatiable curiosity,” she admits, “and I think that’s what drives creativity. Finding possibilities.”
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“She was born with black hair sticking straight up, and she just looked perfect,” her mother recalls. “So we called her Kiku, which in Japanese means ‘eternal joy and happiness.’”
They chose her name from a list supplied by her Japanese grandfather, Chiura Obata, then a professor of art at the University of California, Berkeley. Zen Buddhist and Shinto, he believed nature was far more powerful than human beings. Back in the early ’30s, he would pack a donkey with tents and provisions and hike his family deep into the Yosemite Valley, where he’d spend entire summers painting landscapes as delicate as the morning mist.
The years passed peacefully. Then Pearl Harbor exploded, and his new country spat its rage at his old country. One day an old friend, an Army colonel, came to him and said, “You are going to get rounded up tomorrow. Here’s a pass to get your son out of town, so he can go to school somewhere else.”
Gyo boarded a train for St. Louis that evening, and Washington University welcomed him warmly. His parents wrote from the internment camp, where they had to eat potatoes—which the Japanese consider food for pigs. They did not complain; it was not their way.
As serious and disciplined as his parents, Gyo graduated from Wash. U. and went on to the elite Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he studied under Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (father of Eero, who designed the Arch). One of the Cranbrook scholarship students was Majel “Midge” Chance, a weaving student who was easygoing and exuberant. She fell in love with the intense young architect, they married, and he eventually brought her to St. Louis—where he’d felt so welcome—and founded HOK here.
Kiku, their firstborn, started school in the Webster Groves district, but her parents were so appalled by the art program (“They had graph paper for every holiday, and you just colored in the squares—yellow and purple for Easter, red and green for Christmas,” Midge groans) that they swiftly transferred Kiku to the Community School in Ladue.
She was, after all, the 19th generation of artists in her father’s family.
When she was 4, she glued Cheerios wheels onto matchboxes to make tiny cars. When she was 5, she announced very clearly, “Mom, I don’t want you to clean my room anymore”—and proceeded to keep every object neatly in its place. “She always did things perfectly,” Midge recalls. “She was always quiet—we used to go around saying, ‘What? What did you say?’ But she knew what she wanted to do and just did it.” Gyo says, “In her quiet way, Kiku was very strong—independent, self-contained, in control of herself. She didn’t act like a baby!”
At age 5, Kiku helped take care of her new baby sister, Nori. The next year, Gen came along, and while he and Nori played, Kiku (whom they called Queenie) took gentle charge. For their birthday parties, she created a county fair; painted big cardboard boxes into a train they chugged around the yard; became the Banana Man, sewing banana appliqués to a coat and stuffing the pockets with presents.
Her most grievous mischief was coating her friend’s porch with Crisco so they could keep sliding after the rain evaporated. “My friend’s mother called my mom, screaming how it took her hours on her hands and knees to scrub it off,” she remembers ruefully. “I think my mom sort of thought it was funny.”
After the Crisco, Kiku stayed out of trouble; she never wanted her father to be mad at her. On Saturdays, she went to HOK’s offices with him, carefully touching the wood and stone samples, drawer pulls and miniature doors and tiny squares of tile. On Sundays, the whole family piled in the car and drove around looking at buildings. By age 5, Kiku had announced her life’s goal: “I want to see every building in the world and go inside and see what the people are doing.”
She insists she was a tomboy, although schoolmates recall her as “ethereal.” They maybe didn’t realize how fiercely competitive she was. She fell asleep listening to Cardinals announcer Jack Buck, and she trumped her family at penny poker and Pounce (“She was a master at seeing what was going on and acting quickly,” Gyo says). With the boy next door, Kiku played Indian ball, soccer, kickball, Sorry, Candyland, Chinese checkers and Parcheesi. “I would beat him a lot,” she admits, giggling. “He grew to hate me!”
By her teens, her game was tennis. “My dad could beat me no matter what,” she sighs. “He’d just lob it right over my head, and I’d be running back and forth. That’s when I figured out it’s all mental.”
