By WAKATO ONISHI/ Senior Staff Writer
December 30, 2022 at 18:39 JST
Arata Isozaki (Wakato Onishi)
Award-winning architect Arata Isozaki, a giant in postmodern design since the 1960s, died Dec. 28 of natural causes at the age of 91.
Regarded as a visionary and famed as an urban planner and theorist, Isozaki won the Pritzker Prize, the architectural equivalent of the Nobel Prize, in 2019.
He died at his home in Naha, Okinawa Prefecture.
Roughly a decade after graduating from the prestigious University of Tokyo, he founded his own firm, Arata Isozaki & Associates, in 1963.
In 1967, when he was still in his 30s, he received the Architectural Institute of Japan Award for his design of the Oita Prefectural Library.
In the 1970s, he caught the burgeoning wave of postmodern architecture which emerged in reaction to expressionless box-shaped buildings that had been all the rage.
Isozaki’s postmodernism spawned many avant-garde, artistic works.
Among his best-known are the Museum of Modern Art in Gunma Prefecture and the Kitakyushu City Library in Fukuoka Prefecture, which were completed in 1974 and 1975, respectively.
During the 1980s, he designed the Tsukuba Center in Ibaraki Prefecture. The building is regarded as a landmark of Japan’s postmodern architecture.
He worked overseas since the 1980s, designing the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the indoor sporting arena for the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics and the ice hockey venue for the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics, among many other structures.
His theory absorbed contemporary philosophy, social trends, as well as the arts, and his books published since the 1970s influenced numerous aspiring architects.
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