Arata Isozaki, architect won Pritzker Prize
Arata Isozaki, a prolific Japanese architect, urban planner, and theorist who received a belated Pritzker Architecture Prize at the age of 87, died Wednesday at home in Okinawa. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by his longtime companion, Misa Shin, in a statement.
Practicing at a time of seismic shifts in architectural practice and theory, Mr. Isozaki was both an agent and messenger of change who never repeated himself in his work. Each of his buildings was unique and escaped signature.
In scores of major structures built in a dozen countries, Mr. Isozaki absorbed and reinterpreted Eastern and Western traditions, fluently importing and exporting architectural influences. In a half-dozen books, he explained Japan’s rarefied building customs, emphasizing the nation’s intangible spirit.
An ambassador between cultures, Mr. Isozaki became an international power broker in his field; his colleague Tadao Ando called him “the emperor of Japanese architecture.”
Mr. Isozaki positioned himself as a member of an avantgarde that practiced outside architectural convention. He captured international attention in 1962 with “City in the Air,” a theoretical proposal for treelike megastructures branching like a forest canopy over Tokyo, limbs — cantilevered to the limits of practicable engineering — encrusted with changeable living capsules. Japan’s dense, rapidly expanding cities needed further densification, and “Metabolists” such as Mr. Isozaki believed cellular biological growth provided a model for architecture.
For nearly two decades, Mr. Isozaki built only in Japan, and primarily on the southern island of Kyushu, where he was born. But in 1980, the nascent Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles commissioned him to design its structure. That project nearly foundered when a building committee forced Mr. Isozaki into a design he repudiated in the press. “I had to quit or be fired,” he said at the time.
But failure in Los Angeles would have forced him to retreat to Japan humiliated. Heeding the advice of Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry, Mr. Isozaki won the support of a group of museum trustees, who rescued his design and, with it, both the project and his reputation. Among his most unexpected designs was the Qatar National Convention Center in Doha. Its roof is supported by a phantasmagoric pair of giant concrete “trees” with swelling trunks and thick branches, the surreal forms contradicting the otherwise right-angled, modernist structure. As in many of his buildings, he used the detail to violate the building’s overall system of control — the irrational cohabited with the rational.
Arata Isozaki was born July 23, 1931, in Oita, a city on Kyushu, the eldest of four children of Soji and Tetsu Isozaki. His father was a prominent businessman who ran a successful transport company and wrote haiku.
In 1945, when he was 14, Arata witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima on the shore opposite his hometown. Three days later, southwest of Oita, Nagasaki was bombed.
“I grew up on ground zero,” Mr. Isozaki said when he won the Pritzker Prize in 2019. “There was no architecture, no buildings, and not even a city. So my first experience of architecture was the void of architecture, and I began to consider how people might rebuild their homes and cities.”