Arata Isozaki

1931–2022 · Japanese · 24 buildings on the wall

Arata Isozaki (1931–2022) was a Japanese architect and theorist who refused to keep to one style, treating each design as an answer to its context. As a boy he saw Hiroshima destroyed across the water, and he later said his first experience of architecture was its absence. He trained and worked under Kenzō Tange, opened his own office in 1963, and won the Royal Gold Medal in 1986 and the Pritzker Prize in 2019.

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Reyner Banham saw his early work as a mix of New Brutalism and Metabolism, although Isozaki had declined to sign the Metabolist manifesto of 1960. The Gunma Museum of Modern Art (1974) comes from these years. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1986) became his best-known work in the United States. The Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona (1990) was a main indoor venue of the 1992 Olympics, and the Team Disney Building in Florida (1991) holds what was then the largest sundial. At the Qatar National Convention Centre in Doha (2011), the front columns stand for the Sidra tree of Islamic tradition. Arata Isozaki's buildings show one architect changing approach from site to site.

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