Arata Isozaki

1931-

Arata Isozaki studied to be an architect at University of Tokyo and graduated in 1954.
Three of Isozaki's most important buildings have been designed in close
connection to three big crises in his life.

During the first ten years after graduation he worked for Kenzo Tange but after a
couple of years he felt that he had to do something on his own. Towards the end
of his time at Tange's the pressure from not being able to do the things he
wanted became too much for Arata to handle and he had his first mental crisis.
When he was about to recover from the crisis he and his friend Yukio Futagama
went for a trip around the world; a trip that came to be of big importance to
Arata Isozaki and his future architectural work. Upon returning he finished the
work with his biggest building on his own that far, the Oita Library.

The second crisis came in the late 60's when he worked with the Festival Plaza of
the Osaka Expo in 1970. At this time he found himself caught between the
student movement, with which he sympathized, and the establishment which he
worked for. This crisis finally made him want to start fresh and he did that
with the commission with the Gumma Museum. With this project he left his
previous way of designing behind and ended up with only cubes as a concept of
space. The most important thing to Isozaki with this project was that he found
the three-dimensional shapes which never had been used in Japanese architecture
before. The third crisis appeared in the late 70's and was the necessity for a
new form. A form which he created in Tsukuba Center Building 1979-1983 using
the three-dimensional forms he discovered ten years earlier.

In 1986 he received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal.

(FA)

Arata Isozaki is one of the most influential architects within Japan. Born on 23^rd July 1931, in the City of Oita North Coast of the island of Kyushu, it is here that many of his projects were built. Isozaki graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1954, after graduating Isozaki worked under a prominent Japanese Architect Kenzo Tange significant for combining the traditional Japanese architectural style with Modernism, it is evident through this where Isozaki gained much of his inspiration and architectural style from. Although Isozaki spent most of his life within Tokyo much of his work was still built in the three main cities of Kyushu.

Notable projects of Isozaki includes the Bond University Library, Admin Center, and Faculty of Humanities Building, in Gold Coast Australia and the Oita Prefectural Library. In 1986 he gained the RIBA Gold medal (Royal Institute of British Architects) other notable recipients include Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Buckminster Fuller. In 1954 Global Architecture published an entire journal on Isozaki’s works GA issue #8.

It is possible to say that Kyushu influenced Isozaki’s development of architecture in many subtle ways, as it is possible to detect the historical events that happened within Kyushu of which influenced Isozaki himself. Kyushu due to its rural proximity to Tokyo became a harboring place and a front door for trading to Westerners and China. Its remoteness enabled the government to isolate and thereby to control the introduction of new knowledge and technology from outside Japan. The specialized role of Kyushu its new cultural influences, along with its remoteness can throw some light upon Isozaki’s own style of architecture, explaining his openness to Western Architecture and his rebellion to conform.

The fact that Isozaki is not more well known outside of Japan is less a reflection of his stature or ability as an architect considering his leading position in Japanese architecture, but more of the current standing of Japanese architecture. The flow of knowledge has very much been one sided. In the past critics have always been fascinated by the “Japaneseness” of architecture – a factor which greatly brought out Kenzo Tange to the world – but the fact that Isozaki was so much influenced by Western architecture that his buildings where more or less seen only as copies of what Westerners see on a daily basis, which in a way was a disadvantage. Arata Isozaki of which now has branched his practice out to Italy is still to this day working on major projects.

(TL)
Projects:

TsukubaCentre

https://wiki.monash.edu/contemporary-architecture/bin/view/Main/TsukubaCentre

OitaLibrary

https://wiki.monash.edu/contemporary-architecture/bin/view/Main/OitaLibrary

KitakyushuMuseum

https://wiki.monash.edu/contemporary-architecture/bin/view/Main/KitakyushuMuseum

-- AriSeligmann? - 2013-02-06