Kiyoshi Muto

Kasumigaseki skyscraper in the Kasumigaseki district of Tokyo

Kiyoshi Mutō ( Japanese 武 藤 清 , Mutō Kiyoshi ; born January 29, 1903 in Toride , † March 12, 1989 in Tokyo ) was a Japanese civil engineer and architect. He is considered the father of high-rise construction in Japan because of his contributions to earthquake-proof construction. Some of the most famous skyscrapers in Tokyo come from him.

Live and act

Kiyoshi Mutō lost his parents at an early age and grew up in Sendai , where his brother was a surgeon. He studied architecture and civil engineering at the University of Tokyo from 1922 to 1925 , where he was a lecturer and in 1927 an assistant professor. In 1931 he received his doctorate in civil engineering, spent two years at the TH Berlin-Charlottenburg and in 1935 became a professor for structural engineering.

He developed methods for earthquake-proof construction in Japan. Mutō was shaped by the great earthquake in Tokyo in September 1923, in which he stayed outside the city, but saw the catastrophic destruction on the same day. Afterwards he put the focus of his studies on civil engineering. So he developed a simple but precise method (D method) to calculate the behavior of frames under lateral loads (with predefined distribution functions according to the simulation of earthquakes). In 1933 the method was adopted as the standard by the Japanese Institute for Architecture and it was also widely used abroad. He later developed test methods and measurement procedures for laboratory simulations of the effects of earthquakes on buildings. In 1952 he installed a large-amplitude accelerometer (SMAC) in a large-scale test facility, and in 1961 a special analog computer (SERAC) followed. The static-dynamic behavior of the building was modeled in the non-linear elastic-plastic area.

In 1960 he became dean of the engineering faculty and in 1963 he retired from the University of Tokyo and became vice-president of the construction company Kajima . He led the construction of the first high-rise in Japan, which is notoriously endangered by earthquakes, the 36-story (156 m) high Kasumigaseki high-rise (Kasumigaseki biru [from English buil (ding)]) in Tokyo, completed in 1968. Before that, Japanese regulations banned the Construction of houses more than 31 m high. He constructed a special wall made of precast concrete to absorb the energy from earthquakes (called a slit wall ).

In 1969 he founded the Mutō Institute for Structural Mechanics ( Mutō kōzō rigaku kenkyūjo , English Muto Institute for Structural Mechanics ). In 1977 he left his vice-president position at Kajima to focus on his institute.

Other of his skyscrapers in Tokyo were the World Trade Center ( Sekai bōeki center buil [ding] , 1970) in Hamamatsuchō / Shiba, the Keiō Plaza Hotel (1971) and the Shinjuku Mitsui Building (1974) in Nishi-Shinjuku , the Sunshine 60 ( 1978) in Ikebukuro , the Grand Prince Hotel Akasaka (1982) and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building ( Tōkyō-tochōsha , 1991, the administrative seat of the "Metropolis" ) in Nishi-Shinjuku.

In 1976 he received the first International Award of Merit in Structural Engineering . He received high Japanese awards ( person with special cultural merits in 1979, cultural order in 1983, medal with purple ribbon in 1968, imperial prize of the Japanese Academy in 1964). He was a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering and in 1975 he became a member of the Nippon Gakushiin , the Japanese Academy of Sciences.

He was married to Yoshiko Sano, the daughter of his professor at Tokyo University (Riko Sano), with whom he had a son and two daughters, since 1929.

literature

• S. Noma (Ed.): Mutō Kiyashi . In: Japan. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, 1993, ISBN 4-06-205938-X , p. 1024.

Web links

• Hiroyuki Aoyama, Dr. Kiyoshi Muto (1903–1989), Structural Engineering International, January 2005, web archive