Gyo Obata was an American architect, the son of painter Chiura Obata and his wife, Haruko Obata, a floral designer. In 1955, he co-founded the global architectural firm HOK. He lived in St. Louis, Missouri, and still worked in HOK's St. Louis office. He designed several notable buildings, including the McDonnell Planetarium and GROW Pavilion at the Saint Louis Science Center, the Independence Temple of the Community of Christ church, the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois.
Obata in 2005
Obata in 1980
The James S. McDonnell Planetarium, thin-shell and hyperboloid structure by Gyo Obata, one component of the St. Louis Science Center campus
National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Chiura Obata was a well-known Japanese-American artist and popular art teacher. A self-described "roughneck", Obata went to the United States in 1903, at age 17. After initially working as an illustrator and commercial decorator, he had a successful career as a painter, following a 1927 summer spent in the Sierra Nevada, and was a faculty member in the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1932 to 1954, interrupted by World War II, when he spent a year in an internment camp. He nevertheless emerged as a leading figure in the Northern California art scene and as an influential educator, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, for nearly twenty years and acting as founding director of the art school at the Topaz internment camp. After his retirement, he continued to paint and to lead group tours to Japan to see gardens and art.
Professor Chiura Obata painting in 1944
Professor Obata and family in 1944; (L–R):Gyo, Lily, Haruko, Prof. Obata.
Obata's New Moon, painted at Topaz and exhibited in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1943.
George Hellmuth, Gyo Obata and George Kassabaum in the Welek Fabrics Building on 315 N. 10th St. in St. Louis (1956).