A tribute to the great Japanese architect
By Fred A. Bernstein
Arata Isozaki, who died on Wednesday at 91, in Naha, the capital of Okinawa, was born into a country that would soon be destroyed by war. “His first experience of architecture was the absence of architecture,” said Tom Pritzker, head of the foundation that awarded Isozaki the Pritzker Prize in 2019. Studying the subject was an act of faith, a step toward filling the void that was Japan after 1945. And when he became an architect, in the 1950s, ongoing austerity meant he didn’t have the luxury of doing just one thing. Though always a modernist, he was open to many approaches. “Change became constant,” he told the Times in 2019. “Paradoxically, this came to be my own style.”
That may also explain the scope of his career, which brought him greater success abroad than any other Japanese architect of his generation. His clients included the Aga Khan, King Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain, the ruling family of Qatar, the former Disney chief Michael Eisner, and the hotelier Ian Schrager. His best-known buildings ranged from a stadium in Barcelona to a museum in Los Angeles to the interior of the Palladium night club in New York. Before his death, he was working on projects in Italy, Kazakhstan and Vietnam.
At the same time, he completed dozens of projects in Japan. Among the standouts was the Nara Centennial Hall (1992–1998), where a black, egg-shaped exterior contained a rectangular, glass-enclosed auditorium -- a thrilling contrast between transparent and opaque.
Born in Oita on the island of Kyushu in 1931, Isozaki was a teen when Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both less than 100 miles away as the B-29 flies, were leveled.
After graduating from the architecture department at the University of Tokyo in 1954, he apprenticed to Kenzo Tange, known as the father of postwar Japanese architecture. He opened his own office in 1963. Early works like a library in Oita and museums in Takasaki and Fukuoka combined elements of western brutalism and Japanese metabolism (the idea that buildings can grow organically). Over time he became freer with colors, materials and shapes than most other modernists, but he never ventured into overt borrowing from earlier eras. “Unlike those American postmodernists who believed that classicism held the key to a usable past, Isozaki appeared to understand that no amount of historical excavation could uncover a firm foundation on which to build the present,” Herbert Muschamp wrote in The New York Times in 1993.
Muschamp was reviewing a show of Isozaki’s work at the Brooklyn Museum, evidence of the architect’s popularity in the U.S. in the 1980s and ‘90s. His first realized project outside Japan was the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (1981 to 1986), with a picturesque, red sandstone facade that perhaps seemed a little less contemporary than the art inside. At Schrager’s Palladium (1985, since demolished) he inserted a rectangular “jungle gym” into an ornate theater. For Eisner’s Disney he designed a building with two long office wings that meet at a giant, cone-shaped lobby, brightly colored and equipped as a sundial (1987 to 1990). Around the same time, he renovated and reworked the Bass Museum in Miami Beach.
Though he designed a convention center in Doha and concert halls in Greece and China, he was also open to small projects. When he visited Jerry Sohn, an art book publisher, at Sohn’s retreat near Joshua Tree National Park in the mid-2000s, he decided to design three pavilions, identified as bedrooms for winter, summer, and spring/fall. Each is a construction, a folly almost, of raw concrete, that is completed by the sky, the desert and the boulders around it (respectively, the ceiling, the floor and the walls). Together they total about 200 square feet.
Known as a theorist as well as a practitioner, Isozaki was also the author of several books, including “Japan-ness in Architecture” (2003), which explained some of his country’s intangible building traditions. He was also part of the small group of architects who, in the late 1970s, helped hotel magnate Jay Pritzker plan what became the Pritzker Prize. When the prize was established, Isozaki served as one of its first jurors. In recent years Isozaki, a twice-married widower, lived in Okinawa with his companion, gallery owner Misa Shin.
When he won the Pritzker Prize in 2019, it was considered long overdue. The award had already gone to a contemporary (Fumihiko Maki), to architects a decade younger (Toyo Ito and Tadao Ando) and to others several decades younger (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, and Shigeru Ban). When he finally won, he told the New York Times, with what it called “his trademark sense of humor,” “It’s like a crown on my tombstone.” It’s a crown he wears well.