Arata Isozaki

Arata Isozaki was born in Ōita, on the island of Kyūshū, on 23 July 1931. He was fourteen when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed; his hometown had burned down, and he later recalled that his first experience of architecture was the void of architecture, which led him to wonder how people might rebuild their homes and cities. After graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1954, he apprenticed under Kenzō Tange, then founded his own office in 1963.

His first works were concentrated in Ōita and Fukuoka before spreading to Gunma, Osaka and Tokyo. In the 1960s his designs emphasised powerful masses of concrete, such as the Ōita library (1966), now the Art Plaza, registered as a national cultural property in 2022 for the originality of its hollow beams of exposed concrete, its huge paired outer walls and its split-level interior. In the 1970s he explored the manipulation of pure geometric forms: a frame of cubes at the Gunma museum, two large barrel vaults at the Kitakyūshū Central Library. At the Tsukuba Center Building (1983), a civic centre whose facilities include a concert hall, a hotel and shops, he scattered fragments of Western architecture drawn from Michelangelo, Ledoux and others.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1986), his first overseas commission, launched an international career, and Art Tower Mito (1990) gathered his earlier explorations. Isozaki said he could not keep to a single style: change became constant and, paradoxically, that became his own style. Among more than a hundred built projects are the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona, the Allianz Tower in Milan, the Shanghai Symphony Hall and the Hunan Provincial Museum.

Several of his buildings respond to their sites. At Nagi, the museum's three rooms follow axes drawn from the place, one aimed at the summit of Mount Nagi; in Kraków, the undulations of the Vistula dictate the roof lines of the Manggha Centre; in Yamaguchi, YCAM's wavy roof recalls the ridgelines of the neighbouring mountains; at Akiyoshidai, a fan-shaped open-air theatre is surrounded by woodland. A critic and competition juror, commissioner of the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale (Golden Lion, 1996), RIBA Gold Medallist in 1986, he received the Pritzker Prize in 2019. He died in Naha, Okinawa, on 28 December 2022.