Abstract
If ever an architect bit the hand that fed, it was the young Arata Isozaki, a mercurial and uncompromising architectural talent who would go on to secure establishment respectability with the Pritzker Prize of 2019. But he made his renown with designs and exhibitions exploring themes of death and destruction, not least his ‘Fractures’ pavilion for the 1996 Venice Biennale, which sought to stage the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake from a year earlier, while also being a leading proponent of a playful, almost saccharine postmodernism, with projects including the Team Disney HQ of 1991. Immersed in the leading currents of Japanese architecture from the 1960s onwards, his tendency to snipe at the motives of his collaborators was legendary. Commentators have tried to account for these professional shifts and antagonisms, his dour and contrarian thematic obsessions, as well as his critiques of architectural traditionalism and technological progressivism. Why did he conduct his professional life and art this way? The conclusion seems to be that he was a nihilistic maverick pushing at the outer limits of architectural culture and even taste.
Highlights
This article reopens this question by tracing key themes through Isozaki’s more extreme theoretical writings and design activities as they developed in response to Japanese culture in the 1960s and 1970s
They suggest a belief in an authentic national culture predicated on vigorous rebirth, but one that only comes after everything suspect – including the wellestablished clichés of good taste and culture – had been scandalised and forcibly shaken down to their foundations. It seems that the more acid these men could pour on the traditionalist forms and narratives that their peers used to nourish a sense of nationhood, the better they felt their chances of revealing whether there was anything authentic still surviving beneath. Speaking of his two Demolition stories, Isozaki said ‘I can’t explain it logically because [...] I’m kind of a schizophrenic, divided.’[59]. The concluding story, ‘Rumor City’, finds the two older architects bickering about their past careers
Sin and Arata trade insults paragraph by paragraph, before the voices blend into one another despite the ferocious territoriality of both sides
Summary
This article reopens this question by tracing key themes through Isozaki’s more extreme theoretical writings and design activities as they developed in response to Japanese culture in the 1960s and 1970s.
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