To the death of Arata Isozaki

On Wednesday, December 28, 2022, at the age of 91, Japanese metabolist Arata Isozaki passed away in his home on the island of Okinawa. He built, exhibited, taught, and lectured around the world. He was open to new impulses and sources of inspiration. Likewise, he gave opportunities for his young colleagues from Japan and abroad to succeed, as best illustrated by the Nexus project in Fukuoka from the early 1990s, where personalities like Rem Koolhaas, Christian de Portzamparc, and Steven Holl had the opportunity to build abroad for the first time thanks to him, or in the 1980s by advocating for the realization of a sports club in Hong Kong by the then unknown Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. For his lifetime work, Isozaki received the Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 1986 and also the Pritzker Prize three years ago. During the award ceremony, the then-chairman of the Pritzker jury, Stephen Breyer, made the following acknowledgment: "Isozaki is a pioneer in understanding that the need for architecture is both global and local - that these two forces are part of a single challenge."

Isozaki was born in the city of Oita in southern Japan on the island of Kyushu. He was the oldest of four siblings. His father, Soji Isozaki, was a prominent businessman who ran a successful transportation company and also wrote haiku. At the age of fourteen, Arata witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima, which was only a hundred kilometers away on the opposite coast from his hometown of Oita. When accepting the Pritzker Prize, Isozaki did not neglect to mention this event: “I grew up at ground zero (the site where the atomic bomb was detonated). There was no architecture, no buildings, and not even a city. So my first experience with architecture was architectural emptiness, and I began to think about how people could rebuild their homes and their cities.”

He decided to study architecture at the University of Tokyo. He completed his bachelor's degree in the mid-1950s (he later also completed his doctoral studies at the University of Tokyo) and joined the team of Kenzo Tange. The early work of both architects was under strong Western influence, but in the 1960s (together with other Japanese metabolists like Kiyonori Kikutake or Kisho Kurokawa), they already used their own language based on organic natural growth applied to both buildings and entire cities. Eventually, the metabolists managed to realize several bold visions as well. In the mid-1960s, Isozaki opened his own studio in Tokyo. His work combines and reinterprets Eastern and Western traditions. Throughout his career, he sought to set a direction, not wanting to repeat himself, making it difficult for theorists to categorize him into any specific movement (some critics called him an "architectural partisan" undermining conventions and norms). In the turbulent period of the second half of the 20th century, he tried almost all possible architectural movements.

He gained international recognition in the early 1960s with the Air City project, suspended on tree megastructures branched like a forest canopy over Tokyo. This structure could be modified and supplemented with additional residential capsules in response to the rapidly growing population of Japan's capital city. According to this principle, architects were named "metabolists" because they believed that cellular biological growth could serve as a model for architecture.

Isozaki initially built primarily on the island of Kyushu, where he was born. However, in 1980, the newly established Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MoCA) commissioned him to design its headquarters, which was successfully completed with the support of Frank Gehry and became an icon of postmodern architecture, simultaneously launching Isozaki's forty-year international career.

In addition to his own work, he also devoted himself to organizing exhibitions and publishing. In 2003, he published a theoretical book contemplating Japaneseness in architecture, where he pointed out the simplicity, tranquility, austerity, and humility of Japanese architectural traditions.

Thanks to the Ostrava Cabinet of Architecture, the Czech audience was able to become familiar with Isozaki's work. In 2019 and 2020, an exhibition Arata Isozaki. Sketches and Drawings was gradually held in Ostrava, Brno, and Prague, and a reprise is planned for May next year in Poprad, Slovakia.