Arata Isozaki Research Articles

The Extraordinary Life and Work of Arata Isozaki (1931–2022): Seven Decades of Visionary Architecture

In December 2022, the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, passed away at his home in Okinawa, aged 91. Known as a theorist as well as a practitioner, Isozaki leaves behind a seven-decade career in architecture, with more than 300 designs and 100 built structures on five continents. This article analyzes the extraordinary life and work of the Japanese grandmaster and presents a portrait of his innovative urban design concepts and buildings. Despite its diversity, the author suggests that his oeuvre can be categorized into four distinctly different phases, exemplifying how Isozaki constantly reinvented and challenged himself. Isozaki combined Eastern and Western philosophies like no other architect before him and had a significant influence on Chinese architecture. He also practiced in China, where he had an office in Shanghai (since 2000) and realized a series of important buildings, including the Shenzhen Cultural Center and Library, the Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and the Shanghai Symphony Hall. The author is a former collaborator and project partner of Isozaki during the 1990s, and draws from close knowledge, first-hand observations, and conversations to comment the most relevant projects and adds background information. Isozaki’s work was concerned with formal and intellectual expressions; it is complex and highly personal in its interdisciplinary approach and absorption of a wide range of influences. For Isozaki, architecture was predominantly a cultural practice. Given that Isozaki has recently passed away and his oeuvre is now closed, the changed circumstances ask for a renewed focus and deeper interpretation of his remarkable, unusual legacy. He created original ideas, formal innovations, and versatile concepts for spaces that defy characterization as belonging to any single tendency or school of thought.

Le città invisibili as Cybertext and Cyberspace: Italo Calvino, Ted Nelson, and Arata Isozaki

ABSTRACT This article considers the place of Le città invisibili within the debate on cybernetics, both as a product of its time as well as a harbinger of the future advent of network culture. It proposes to interpret the two most emblematic images of the book – the enchanted palace of the Kublai Khan, and the everchanging ‘invisible cities’ visited by Marco Polo – as Calvino’s personal contribution to the definition of cybertext and cyberspace. Curiously, the same emblematic images are also found in the work of two of Calvino’s contemporaries: the American pioneer of information technology Ted Nelson, and the Japanese architect and exponent of the Metabolist movement Arata Isozaki. Through a comparative analysis, this article shows how the new concept of information brought by cybernetics crystallised in virtually identical images and metaphors across disciplines and cultures: in literature, with Calvino, in computer science with Nelson, and in architecture with Isozaki.

The Face of Another: Isozaki, Deme, and the Postmodern Turn

Abstract Focusing on the early work and collaborations of the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, this paper researches links between the robotic culture of postwar Japan and the surge of figuration in postmodernism, challenging the commonly held view that this architectural movement emerged in the West. Specifically, the paper looks at how Isozaki's robotic creation for Expo '70 embodied the notion of theatrical mask, which characterized both postmodern ideals and early Japanese robotics, and influenced his own architectural work. Delving into Isozaki's creative exchanges with the film director Hiroshi Teshigahara and the novelist Kōbō Abe, coming into contact with each other in the 1950s, a synergy between cinema, literature, and architecture is highlighted, considering their speculations about possible technological means of reconstructing the human face in light of the symbolic dimension of this enterprise for Japan as a nation, and for architecture as a discipline.

Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis

Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis

Kritikujući kritički regionalizam, formalna analiza kao alternativa - studija slučaja istorijskog konteksta i projekata u Japanu

This paper first provides an overview on Kenneth Frampton's methodology of Critical Regionalism, which is criticised by contemporary scholars for reducing various regional qualities of architecture into its material realm, such as tectonics, architectural details, structures etc. After this, a case study on this matter will be conducted by taking Japan as its main subject. The study explicitly focuses on the mutual process between the establishment of 'Japan-ness' as its architectural identity and the material reduction of its cultural characteristics that are primarily discussed in series of essays by Arata Isozaki. Further developing on the above discussion, the overarching goal of this paper is to seek an alternative method to Critical Regionalism, that could contribute to forming a broader knowledge of the regional subjects. To strategically deviate from the material aspect of architecture, Peter Eisenman's 'Formal Analysis' will be investigated as a potential alternative. The final section will apply this method to two architectural precedents in Japan, aiming to capture the rather abstract concept of Hashi<端>, which would otherwise be muted by the process of material reduction of cultural identities discussed above.

Demolition traditions: Isozaki and Sakaguchi

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.

It is time to look back on postmodernism

It is time to look back on postmodernism

Arata Isozaki: the architect as artist

This paper is not a comprehensive survey of the architectural career of Arata Isozaki, one of the most distinguished practicing architects in the world today and the 2019 winner of the Pritzker Prize, but a specific look at his formative years of the 1960s when he began to build his own design methodology. It delineates Isozaki’s encounter with the avant-garde art movement of the 1960s, collectively called “Anti-Art, ” against the backdrop of the “anti-spirit” of Japanese society. Although Isozaki’s artistic side has been overstated at times, previous studies rarely addressed how his intensive interactions with art circles played a role in shaping his design methodology. I would like to examine the convergence of creative individuals and cross-disciplinary connections to understand Isozaki’s architectural thinking.This study examines how Isozaki’s collaborations with his artist contemporaries enabled him to formulate the notion of the “invisible city, ” a radically new design concept characterised by the expansion of the nature of architecture from producing isolated built-forms to all-encompassing natural and manmade environments. However, after drawing on communications and information theory, which prevailed in 60s architectural circles, Isozaki’s destructive and anarchistic connotation of “invisible city” was channeled into a systematic cybernetic model and eventually transformed into a constructive planning method. I will discuss the realisation of a cybernetic environment at the Festival Plaza of Expo’ 70 and trace the legacy of “invisible city” in his later postmodern work.

Mamoru Kawaguchi: Master of motion and lightness of structures

Mamoru Kawaguchi (1932–2019) was one of the great structural engineers of the late 20th century. He developed his career mostly in Japan and he has also superb works in China, Singapore and Spain. The spectrum of his structures is manifold: he designed shells, space frames, inflatable structures, tension structures, timber–steel hybrid systems and so on. With them, he conceived and provided the bones and muscles of sports halls, exhibition halls, museums, railway stations, towers, bridges and sculptures. Kawaguchi collaborated with some of the best architects of his time: Kenzo Tange, Arata Isozaki and Kazuyo Sejima just to cite some of the internationally most renowned. For his works, he was awarded many times in Japan, as well as internationally (the Architectural Institute of Japan award, the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures Torroja Medal, the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering International Award and many others). In this article, I review Mamoru Kawaguchi’s main professional and academic achievements, and discuss his design philosophy, sources of inspiration and means to develop his ideas from my own personal experience.

06.05: Wind and Earthquake Damping System for the Isozaki/Allianz Tower in Milan, Italy

ABSTRACTThe Isozaki or Allianz Tower in Milan, designed by Arata Isozaki and Andrea Maffei, is one of the three office towers of the CityLife, redevelopment project in the area of the historic exhibition area of Milan. It's a mixed reinforced concrete and steel structure of 202 m height (207 m considering the city ground level) and 247 m including the television antenna. It has 50 storeys above ground, and is the tallest Italian building according to the criteria of highest occupied floor and height to tip. Due to the height and the slender shape (24 m × 60 m in plan) of the tower, the wind and seismic protection system comprises 8 special fluid viscous dampers (FVDs) connected to the base of the building by means of 4 long struts (two for each strut). Each FVDs is characterized by 1304 kN maximum force and ±150 mm maximum displacement capacity. They manage to mitigate the wind effects by suppressing the anticipated wind‐induced accelerations and improving the comfort inside the building. Although Milan is a low seismicity area, the dampers were also designed to sustain also earthquake effects. Therefore, due to the completely different dynamic behaviour of wind and earthquake, the dampers were designed to change behaviour passively, i.e. activated only by the different velocity of the relative displacement between the two ends of the damper. Thus, the velocity exponent α of the typical force vs. velocity constitutive law of the fluid viscous dampers is 1 (linear behaviour) under wind input while is lower than 0.1 (strongly non‐linear behaviour) under earthquake input. Two of the 8 FVDs were subjected to a complete test protocol required by European Standard “Anti‐seismic devices” EN15129:2009 in FIP Industriale Laboratories. This paper describes the FVDs and reports the most important test results, confirming the required behaviour of the devices both under service wind and ULS wind or earthquake.

Reappraising the Visionary Work of Arata Isozaki: Six Decades and Four Phases

This article analyses the work and presents a portrait of Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. His designs and buildings span six decades and it is suggested that these can be categorised into four distinctively different phases. As a former collaborator of Isozaki during the 1990s, the author is able to draw from first-hand observations and knowledge to explain relevant projects. As the discussion points out, Isozaki’s work is highly unusual, original, complex and personal in its absorption of a multitude of influences and its interdisciplinary approach; thus, one could say that he has created ideas and concepts for spaces that defy characterisation as belonging to any single school of thought.

Radical Eclecticism and Post-Modern Architecture

Charles Jencks' The Language of Post-Modern Architecture – first published in English in 1977, republished in 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987 and 1991 – was commissioned by Architectural Design editor Haig Beck on the strength of Jencks' article, “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism.” This article featured in AD's special issue on the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, published in January 1977. According to Beck, the book was expected to develop the article. This paper considers the relationship between “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism” and The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. It interrogates the nature of the link between ostensible progenitor and product, focusing on the use of the term and concept Radical Eclecticism in both texts. The paper finds substantial differences between the respective positions of “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism” and The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. It argues these differences are such that the latter is not best considered as a development of the former. The nature of the differences between article and book gives cause for a reappraisal of the rhetorical basis to The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.

A City for Education

Ameena Ahmadi is Architecture Manager at the Qatar Foundation, overseeing the development of the masterplan and facilities of Education City in Doha, a multi‐institution educational campus, incorporating schools and universities. Ahmadi describes how education is a significant cornerstone for Qatar's national transition ‘to a knowledge‐based’ economy from a ‘hydrocarbon‐based’ one. This is symbolised by substantial investment in the flagship Education City with its Arata Isozaki masterplan and its individual schools and universities designed by premier international architects.

Buildings must die: a perverse view of architecture

Buildings, although inanimate, are often assumed to have life. And the architect, through the act of design, is assumed to be their conceiver and creator. But what of the of buildings? What of the decay, deterioration, and destruction to which they are inevitably subject? And what might such endings mean for architecture's sense of itself? In Buildings Must Die, Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs look awry at core architectural concerns. They examine spalling concrete and creeping rust, contemplate ruins old and new, and pick through the rubble of earthquake-shattered churches, imploded housing projects, and demolished Brutalist office buildings. Their investigation of the death of buildings reorders architectural notions of creativity, reshapes architecture's preoccupation with good form, loosens its vanities of durability, and expands its sense of value. It does so not to kill off architecture as we know it, but to rethink its agency and its capacity to make worlds differently. Cairns and Jacobs offer an original contemplation of architecture that draws on theories of waste and value. Their richly illustrated case studies of building deaths include the planned and the unintended, the lamented and the celebrated. They take us from Moline to Christchurch, from London to Bangkok, from Tokyo to Paris. And they feature the work of such architects as Eero Saarinen, Carlo Scarpa, Cedric Price, Arata Isozaki, Rem Koolhaas and Francois Roche. Buildings Must Die is both a memento mori for architecture and a call to to reimagine the design values that lay at the heart of its creative purpose.

Review: Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture; Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture; and Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture

Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam 6 September 2012–6 January 2013 Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany 23 February–11 August 2013 National Museum, Oslo, Norway 18 October 2013–26 January 2014 Since the end of the 1960s, Louis Isadore Kahn’s reputation as one of the most important architects of the twentieth century has grown. Kahn’s concrete-and-brick buildings, with their enigmatically monumental appearance, can be experienced only through costly trips to the United States, South Asia, and Israel. The Kahn retrospective (in Weil am Rhein at the time of writing and exhibited previously in Rotterdam) was only the second opportunity since an exhibition at the ETH in Zurich in 1969 for those on the European continent to take a look at his work. Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture , organized by the Vitra Design Museum, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, showed a new generation of the European architectural community the work of the architect in an exhibition that was enormously rich in material. The concept of the exhibition was developed by the Swiss architectural theorist Stanislaus von Moos and the Vitra curator Jochen Eisenbrand. They aimed for a picture of Kahn in the context of the latest scholarly research, concentrating on Kahn’s biography and his discerning, philosophically inspired understanding of nature. The exhibition was conceptualized as a thematically structured multimedia show. Frank Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum (1989), a sculptural conglomerate of nested geometric bodies that at times tilt into one another, would seem at first fully opposed to the archaic strength of Kahn’s architectural language. Inside the exhibition rooms, the strain between Gehry’s deconstructive staging and Kahn’s almost always right-angled forms nonetheless largely resolved itself. They impinged upon each other occasionally, as when in the upper story Gehry’s asymmetrically angled skylights met the iconic monumentality of Kahn’s parliament and administrative buildings for Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Ahmedabad, India. The exhibition summarized Kahn’s work under seven main headings, the first focusing on biography, followed by …

One Foot Out of the Plastic Cage: The Un-Americanization of West German Consumer Society

One Foot Out of the Plastic Cage:The Un-Americanization of West German Consumer Society David Steigerwald (bio) Jan L. Logemann. Trams or Tailfins? Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. vii + 300 pp. Figures, tables, abbreviations, notes, and index. $45.00. For about a week in Summer 2011, my favorite restaurant became the Lidenbrau at Potsdamer Platz. Partly, this was because I did not know Berlin well, and the prominent location is easy to find. Though I had never been there, the place looked familiar. Helmut Jahn’s SONY building famously lords over the site, Mt. Fuji–like; but given contemporary architects’ apparent conviction that no amount of glass is too much, one could be forgiven for thinking of Jahn’s buildings in Philadelphia or Chicago. The clearest proof that we weren’t in Kansas City was the waiter’s response when my companion asked for tap water: He shook his head in stern disapproval and delivered an emphatic “NO!” Today’s Potsdamer Platz is an international architectural showcase. After the Wall came down, the junction became the world’s largest single construction site and gave work to an array of world-renowned architects, including Jahn, Renzo Piano, Arata Isozaki, and Richard Rogers. They brought with them the latest in building fashion, if not a rich knowledge of, or respect for, the city’s past. For many Berliners, the plaza’s pell-mell reconstruction symbolized not so much German redemption as the post–Cold War triumph of global capitalism at virtually the precise geographical flash point of three-quarters of a century of profound human conflict. Destroyed in the war, left desolate in No Man’s Land after 1961, Potsdamer Platz was mostly a weed-strewn wasteland in the early 1990s. Then the city invited multinationals like SONY to scoop up huge tracts of prime real estate for their vanity buildings, and the architects imposed their visions without much reference to Berlin’s notable architectural past. City officials and locals alike bemoaned the “Manhattanization” of a space that has played a key role in their city since Frederick the Great turned it into the main point of royal entry into the capital from Sanssouci. Surely this was a better resolution than bombs and guard posts, but it was bound to leave anyone who cared about the German-ness of the city ambivalent at best. [End Page 132] It is tricky business negotiating between the homogenizing pressures of global capital and particular social and cultural forms, and the most important contribution that Jan L. Logemann makes in Trams or Tailfins? is his largely convincing explanation for how a distinct value system can shape and control consumer capitalism in ways that honor, rather than obliterate, that distinctiveness. In arguing that West Germany was not “Americanized” after the war, Logemann joins a long debate about American consumer capitalism’s power, sweep, and depth of influence in the developed world through the second half of the twentieth century. In pointed contrast to Reinhold Wagnleitner’s Coca-colonization and the Cold War (1994) and Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire (2005), Logemann argues that, for all the noisy commentary, pro and con, about postwar Americanization, West Germans shaped their version of the affluent society according to deeply held and distinctly un-American values. Rather than a sweeping homogenization of the developed world, postwar affluence ran along “different paths to consumer modernity” (p. 2). Logemann’s book is a closely reasoned “structural comparison” (p. 2) of the competing manners by which the United States and West Germany moved through the postwar Age of Affluence. He argues that, during the postwar “miracle years,” West Germans molded a regime of consumption based on the ideal of “social citizenship” and insisted on a privileged place for public goods over merely private ones. Instead of the “consumer-as-citizen” (whom Lizabeth Cohen, in The Consumer’s Republic [2003], defined as the main social type in postwar America), West Germans promoted the social consumer who practiced “public consumption,” which Logemann defines as “the provision of publicly funded alternatives to private consumer goods and services in areas ranging from housing...

La ética de la impermanencia. El dibujo del tiempo frente al dibujo del espacio. Tange, Iisozaki y Price

Faced with the representation of space, the representation of time has been essential, during the twentieth century. We propose a journey through time that takes us from Tokyo to London in a kind of round trip between the two cities between 1955 and 1970.We propose a review of three architects, the japaneses Kenzo Tange and Arata Isozaki, and British Cedric Price, which is manifested in a new architectural paradigm as a synthesis of interdisciplinary artistic, philosophical or scientific theories – the Uncertainty principle by Heisenberg, the graphic proccesses of John cage, or Gordon Pask’s cybernetics – where the architect, from his deep understanding of the impossibility, in unstable socio-economic conditions, designs with a degree of uncertainty to accommodate the uncertainties of the program, the obsolete and radical changes in use during the life of the building – to verify the potential of uncertainty in the postindustrial society and contemporary design strategies.

Research on the Contemporary Japanese Architectural Creation and its Special Aesthetical Taste of Nationality

Contemporary Japanese architecture has achieved great success and has been widely accepted by the whole architectural field. What is the driving force for the contemporary Japanese architectural creation is worth of thinking carefully about. In this study, some famous Japanese architects, including Toyo Ito, Tadao Ando, Arata Isozaki, Kengo Kuma, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa and their architectural studiess are analyzed and studied from the angle of nationality. These architects keep up with the step of the world architecture and always pursuit the aesthetical taste of nationality. They proposed some special architectural theories that profoundly reflect the nationality of Japanese and make great influence on the architectural forms, architectural space and architectural aesthetics of Contemporary Japanese architecture. In the architectural form, they pursuit the simplicity, pureness, lightness and finesses; in the architectural space and behavior, they pursuit the shadow of the ma space and nature existence; in the architectural aesthetics, they pursuit the beauty of animism, dreariness and substance sadness. Through conjoint analysis of the architectural examples and the theory of nationality, this study proposed that the contemporary Japanese architectural creation is directly derived from the profound traditional culture and firm nationality and nationality is the cornerstone of the Japanese architecture and always promotes the progress of the Japanese architecture.

Review: Project Japan: Metabolism Talks … by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist; Kayoko Ota and James Westcott, eds.; Metaborisumu nekusasu by Hajime Yatsuka; Metabolism: The City of the Future; Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan by Mori Art Museum

Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist; Kayoko Ota and James Westcott, eds. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks … Cologne: Taschen GmbH, 2011, 720 pp. US$59.99, ISBN 9783836525084 (English) Hajime Yatsuka Metaborisumu nekusasu Tokyo: Ohmsha, 2011, 466 pp., 170 b/w illus. ¥6,300, ISBN 9784274210112 (Japanese) Mori Art Museum Metabolism: The City of the Future; Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan Tokyo: Mori Art Museum and Shinkenchiku-Sha Co. Ltd., 2011, 336 pp., 269 color and 319 b/w and sepia illus. Japanese ed. ¥4,800, English ed. ¥6,300, ISBN 9784786902345 (Japanese), 9784904700259 (English) Three recent books on Japan’s mid-twentieth-century Metabolist movement demonstrate how differing source materials yield new insights into important architectural moments. That the authors were able to develop new perspectives regarding one of the first truly media-aware architectural movements—concerning practitioners who have, over the past half century, reaped major international awards and published numerous books on their work and thinking—shows what can be revealed by moving beyond disciplinary conventions. Rem Koolhaas spearheaded a multilingual team of researchers, interviewers, and photographers who produced the most fascinating of these three texts, a book that he explicitly and repeatedly argues should not be considered an architectural history. Instead, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks … is presented as an oral history. Drawing on his early years as a journalist, Koolhaas, with Hans Ulrich Obrist, traveled to Japan in 2005 and 2008 to sound out Metabolism’s surviving protagonists on their recollection of Japan’s heady postwar era. The resulting 720-page book features nine of these interviews laced with insightful commentary and sidebar quotes from others such as Charles Jencks, Hajime Yatsuka, Hiroshi Hara, and Toyo Ito.1 These comprise roughly a third of the text and are interspersed with essays and a wealth of graphic material: historical photographs and architectural drawings never before published in English; slick timelines, maps, and infographics designed for the book, allowing for rapid appreciation of denser points; and tiny, often illegible reprints of newspaper articles, government reports, and men’s and women’s style magazines, even a page from the Japanese-language Playboy . Metabolists Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, Kiyonori Kikutake, and Kenji (a.k.a. Genji) Ekuan have the strongest presence in these interviews, but the book also includes conversations with the editor of the 1960 Metabolist manifesto Noboru Kawazoe; “shadow Metabolist” Arata Isozaki; mentor Atsushi Shimokobe (who would emerge as a powerful bureaucrat in Japan’s central …

Tokyo, 1955-1970: a new avant-garde

Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde explores the extraordinary convergence of artists, intellectuals, and creators in Japans capital city during the radically transformative postwar period. Examining works from a range of media paintings, sculpture, photographs, drawings, prints, videos and films, as well as graphics, architecture, musical compositions and dance this is the first publication in English to focus in depth on the full scope of postwar art in Japan. The city during this period was a vibrant hub that attracted such critical artistic figures as Taro Okamoto, Hiroshi Nakamura, Ay-O, Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi and Tetsumi Kudo; photographers Daido Moriyama, Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu; illustrators and graphic designers Tadanori Yokoo, Kohei Sugiura and Kiyoshi Awazu; and architects Arata Isozaki and Kisho Kurokawa; as well as many important artists collectives. Curator Doryun Chongs introductory essay investigates Tokyos sociopolitical context and the massive urban changes that redefined the city as a vital node in the international avant-garde network. Essays by scholars Hayashi Michio and Miryam Sas and curator Mika Yoshitake discuss central notions of postwar Japanese art, including design and graphics; the development of new sculptural languages; and the intermedia trend that engendered experimental performance works and cross-pollination among artistic modes.