The Japanese architect Arata Isozaki was one of the most important representatives of his field. He has created a body of work that has been constantly transformed over many decades. In 2019 he was honored with the Pritzker Prize for his work.
Japanese architect Arata Isozaki (1931–2022).
The work of the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki was based on a traumatic experience. As a child, he witnessed the destruction of his hometown of Oita on the island of Kyushu, where he was born in 1931. At the end of the war, a few days after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the country lay in ruins. Later, but long before Francis Fukuyama’s bestseller of the same name, Isozaki spoke of the “end of history” in view of this situation.
In the episode Isozaki repeatedly addresses the theme of the ruin. In 1962 he drew «Incubation Process», the dystopian vision of a modern Japanese urban structure growing out of fragments of a Greek temple, which already contained the germ of destruction: «The cities of the future are also ruins. Our contemporary cities are born to live for a fleeting moment. Then they lose their energy and turn back into inert matter.”
The idea of cyclic renewal is not alien to Asian thought. And yet «Incubation Process» was a provocation. In Japan, the 1960s are considered the decade of metabolism. The architectural avant-garde plans future cities in which organic growth and a belief in technological progress are combined. With the internationally acclaimed Metabolism, Japan is returning to the world architecture stage, and Kenzo Tange, in whose studio Isozaki works from 1954 to 1963, is the spiritus rector of the movement.
Early Iconic Works
But this image of the bright future coinciding with Japan’s emergence as an industrial nation begins to crack in Isozaki. He, too, who opened his own office in 1963, initially benefited from the reconstruction programs for the municipal infrastructure. His career began in his native Oita, where, among other things, he built the central library (1966), which is now used as a municipal gallery. This masterpiece of exposed concrete architecture, with its superimposed and interpenetrating load-bearing structures and spatial sequences, brings the ideas of metabolism to a head in a mannerist and expressive manner.
The same construction task, nine years later – but how different the building that is being built in the nearby town of Kitakyushu looks. A serpentine structure over which the architect stretched a barrel vault. In doing so, he quotes one of the most famous library visions in western architectural history, that of the Frenchman Etienne-Louis Boullée. Isozaki shrinks the megalomaniacal dimensions of the room down to the scale of a Japanese provincial town, but the play with the clear geometries fascinates him.
With this, the ideas of postmodernism also caught on in Japan: Isozaki recreated the Capitol Square with its paving for the Tsukuba Center Building (1978–83) north of Tokyo. With the Mito Art Tower (1986–90) he refers to Constantin Brancusi’s «Endless Column», which appears here translated into architecture. Postmodernism, at its best, is an intelligent and imaginative play with traditions and conventions, which Isozaki masters with virtuosity.
Like no other architect, he manages to bridge the gap between West and East, between pop and profundity: in New York in 1976 he takes part in the MAN transFORMS exhibition curated by Hans Hollein and presents a walk-in birdcage with bars whose contours are modeled on those of Marilyn Monroe’s legs. And in Paris, two years later, he staged a legendary show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which attempted to bring the European public closer to the concept of «Ma», which is essential for the Japanese understanding of space and which does not address the spatial boundary but the in-between and thus space and time connected to each other.
Promoter of young architects
Since the construction of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, Isozaki has been increasingly active in the western world – as an architect, but also as a mediator, interlocutor and influential juror in competitions. It is thanks to his commitment that Lausanne native Bernard Tschumi was able to realize the Parc de la Villette in Paris. And in Hong Kong in 1983 he paved the way for a world career for the young architect Zaha Hadid by winning the Peak competition.
Because a functioning competition system is virtually non-existent in Japan, he ensures that public buildings in the province of Kumamoto are awarded to outstanding, mostly young, architects. Over the years, a proudly marketed open-air museum of modern architecture has emerged there. In 1989, Isozaki developed the master plan for “Nexus World” in Fukuoka, an eight-hectare site on which, at his invitation, projects by Steven Holl, Rem Koolhaas and Osamu Ishiyama were realized. Between 1994 and 2001 Isozaki is responsible for planning a large housing estate in Gifu. Only women architects are involved here, including Elizabeth Diller, Kazuyo Sejima and the landscape architect Martha Schwartz.
However, Isozaki did not receive the Pritzker Prize, which is often referred to as the Nobel Prize for architecture, until 2019. Professional colleagues whose careers he himself had promoted significantly, such as Toyo Ito or Kazuyo Sejima, had long since passed him. But even if international attention has focused on a younger generation of architects from Japan in recent years: Isozaki remained enormously productive well into his late creative phase. He has constantly changed and has remained agile enough to react to new requirements, but without exhausting himself in the time-bound.
Back to the beginnings
Even in old age he erected buildings of lasting quality. Such as the National Convention Center in Qatar (2011), whose massive canopy rests on tree-like structures. They are reminiscent of the lotus tree, which according to the Koran stands at the end of the seventh heaven. Or the Himalayas Center in Shanghai (2013), a three-dimensional collage of cavernous caverns, ornamental structures and high-rise towers for a typically Chinese mixture of shopping mall, museum and hotel.
In 2011, the Lucerne Festival commissioned Isozaki to design a temporary concert hall with artist Anish Kapoor, which toured as an inflatable structure through areas devastated by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, through a re-devastated Japan. In this way, the life work of this outstanding architect has come full circle. Arata Isozaki died on Thursday December 29th in Tokyo at the age of 91.
