When Arara Isozaki was asked what architecture impressed him the most as a young person, he replied that he was primarily shaped by the lack of architecture - the emptiness left by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in 1945 on the opposite bank of his hometown, Oita.
Isozaki was born there in the summer of 1931 as the son of a transport company;
At the end of the war he was 14. Like his peers in Germany, he was one of those who not only rebuilt the country in the 1950s, but also gave it a new identity.
Niklas Maak
Editor in the features section.
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Isozaki studied architecture with Kenzo Tange, who was celebrated like a pop star in Japan and who was commissioned by the government to define a new Japanese style. With him, Isozaki learned to short-circuit the Japanese tradition with the western, especially the American modern and the international style. At the Olympic Games in 1964, Japan wanted to present itself as a modern, democratic industrial nation. At the same time, the movement of the metabolists emerged, who designed houses that would grow like bodies or plants along skeletons and allow the city to flourish as an organism. The architecture of the future should be shaped not by the finished form, but by change and flexibility, the high-rise building should be able to proliferate like a plant through endless cell growth, and culture should be able to copy its strategies from nature.
Isozaki, who, like Tange, never counted himself among the metabolists, created one of the most powerful images associated with this movement for the Olympic Games: his “City in the Air” consisted of huge concrete pillars on which the honeycomb-like residential units like Branches of giga trees hung high above Tokyo's Shinjuku district and were supposed to solve all space problems.
Increasingly biomorphic forms
In Isozaki's first building, the influence of Le Corbusier's concrete modernism, but even more that of American architecture, can be clearly seen: Paul Rudolph's Orange County Government Center, for example, looks like a blueprint for Isozaki's library by Oita, which was completed earlier but started later. Nevertheless, Isozaki's buildings are never epigonal: The concrete elements of the library, for example, look like an echo of the old Japanese wooden architecture with their protruding beams. In the following decades Isozaki built a lot in Europe, from the tomb of the composer Luigi Nono in Venice to the Allianz Tower in Milan and the building of the Berliner Volksbank on Potsdamer Platz. In his late work one can increasingly find biomorphic forms - the lower floors of the Zendai Himalayas Center in Shanghai,a shopping mall with a hotel and a convention center, look like a mixture of caves, hollow bones and a watered-down Zaha Hadid facade, the facade of the Qatar National Convention Center is held up by two abstract, giant tree trunks. In 2019 Isozaki was awarded the Pritzker Prize.
Gaps and interim times are more important than time and space, is a well-known bon mot of the architect - the emptiness that arises between buildings and moments. In Japan there is the multi-layered philosophical concept of the “Ma”, which discovers a potential, an appearance in the void. How Isozaki imagines such an activating space between styles, forms and buildings can be seen in Los Angeles. There the architect designed the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1986, which is cited today as one of the most important examples of Japanese postmodernism - a kind of village made up of several, stylistically different buildings replaces the classic modern museum. This is also a homage to the original Greek idea of the Museion, which is not a temple for art, but one of culture, storytelling,Walking around and being together was a grove with many individual buildings, a counter-city of the arts and fictions.
The astonished experts saw a different echo of antiquity when Isozaki presented the designs for his Tsukuba Center Building in the 1980s: a drawing shows the planned complex as a future ruin. This, too, is a typical Isozaki punchline that makes clear his belief in constant change: the finished house will also be exposed to change, weathering and decay, and at some point its ruins can be repopulated and expanded. At a time when Western societies are heading towards an unprecedented production of ruins due to the effects of digitization - ruins of post offices, shopping centers, office towers - Arata Isozaki's foreshadowing designs for decay are unimaginably topical and explosive. Tomorrow the Japanese architect will be ninety years old.