Arata Isozaki Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Arata Isozaki (1931-2022) was a Japanese architect, theorist and curator whose career spanned six decades and four continents. A student of Kenzo Tange, he moved from the radical urban visions of the 1960s to a playful, historically allusive architecture that made him a leading figure of postmodernism, with buildings such as the Gunma Museum of Modern Art, the Tsukuba Center Building, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona. He received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2019.

Ōita, Tange and the city in ruins

Isozaki was born in Ōita on the island of Kyushu in 1931 and was a teenager when the Second World War ended, an experience of destroyed cities that shaped his lifelong interest in ruins and impermanence. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1954 and spent nine years in Kenzo Tange’s studio, working on urban projects such as the Plan for Tokyo 1960 while developing his own ideas, including the City in the Air.

Early buildings in Ōita and Gunma

Isozaki opened his own office in 1963. His early buildings in his home town, among them the Ōita Prefectural Library (1966), used heavy concrete beams and a strong sense of structure. In the Gunma Museum of Modern Art (1974) he turned to the cube as a pure frame for art, an approach he described as working with “maniera”, a deliberate manipulation of form.

Tsukuba and MOCA: postmodern icons

The Tsukuba Center Building (1983), a civic centre for a new science city near Tokyo, quotes Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, Ledoux and other sources while leaving its central plaza empty, a comment on the absence of a clear national symbol. In Los Angeles he designed the Museum of Contemporary Art (1986), a composition of pyramids, cylinders and red sandstone volumes, and he went on to build the Team Disney Building in Orlando and the Palau Sant Jordi for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

Writer, curator and the Pritzker Prize

Isozaki was also an influential writer and curator, organising the exhibition Ma: Space-Time in Japan in 1978 and publishing essays collected in Japan-ness in Architecture. He was an early supporter of younger architects, including Zaha Hadid and Kazuyo Sejima, and in his later years built the Qatar National Convention Centre and the inflatable concert hall Ark Nova. He received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1986 and the Pritzker Prize in 2019, and died in Okinawa in 2022.