Arata Isozaki, a world-renowned Japanese architect who was belatedly awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2019, died on Wednesday at the age of 91, his agency said on Friday, confirming information from multiple media outlets.
He died of old age at his home in Okinawa, southwestern Japan, and his funeral was to be held in the privacy of his family, his architecture firm said in a brief statement to AFP.
Highly prolific and cosmopolitan, Isozaki was known for never attempting to validate a particular style, but rather striving to integrate his constructions into their surroundings as best he could.
“My pleasure is in creating different things, not repeating the same thing,” he told specialist site ArchDaily in November 2017.
“It’s very disturbing for the media or identity and all those things,” he slipped with a mischievous expression.
His most famous works include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1986), which launched his international career, the multi-purpose Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona, built for the 1992 Olympic Games, and even the Qatar National Convention Center (2011), a convention center in Doha with gigantic columns shaped like branches.
Promoter of the “Ma” concept
He has also built many cultural buildings in Japan and China, residential towers in Bilbao in Spain, the colorful Disney headquarters in Florida and the skyscraper Allianz Tower in Milan (2015), also called “Isozaki Tower”.
Born in 1931 in Oita on the southern island of Kyushu, Isozaki, like his entire generation, was scarred by the Second World War, during which most Japanese cities were destroyed by American bombing.
“Everything was in ruins […]. I was surrounded only by barracks and shelters. So my first experience with architecture was the absence of architecture, and I started thinking about how people could rebuild their homes and their cities,” he said.
He grew up between Japanese traditionalism and the influence of American culture brought to the Japanese archipelago during the post-war occupation. This led to him dealing early on with the contrasts of aesthetic codes in East and West and wanting to build bridges between the two.
Like Tadao Ando, another famous Japanese architect who was ten years his junior, Isozaki was very attached to the Japanese concept of “ma”, which deals with the interval between two objects or actions, and was one of its first passers-by in the occident .
He was an apprentice to Japanese modernist architect Kenzo Tange before founding his own firm, Arata Isozaki & Associates, in 1963, which later opened offices in Spain, Italy and China.