On Kyūshū, the southwesternmost of Japan’s main islands, Nagasaki and Ōita face each other not too far apart. Arata Isozaki, born in 1931 in the port city of Ōita, was only 14 years old when an American atomic bomb was detonated over Nagasaki in August 1945. Harry S. Truman, US President at the time, previously noted in his diary: “I think the Japs will back down (…)” They do. The bomb destroyed 80 percent of all buildings within a radius of one kilometer. In the inner city area, 22,000 people die immediately. Tens of thousands die as a result. Like Hiroshima three days earlier, Nagasaki is history.
Where there was a city full of houses, streets, squares and people, an apocalyptic emptiness spreads. The fact that the architect Arata Isozaki, who is influenced by it, credibly reinterpreted the emptiness of horror and madness into an emptiness of poetry and hope is one of the intellectual, but probably deeply emotional achievements in the realm of architecture that can only be described as wondrous . Thus Isozaki, one of the most important architects of a knowing modernity that is at the same time a hopeful modernity, became a man who exchanged bitterness for longing. Later he will say that it is not the spaces that are important, but the spaces in between. And not the time, but the meantime. This also applies to his lifetime. Pritzker Prize winner Isozaki has died at the age of 91, according to his office.
The student of Kenzō Tange soon emancipated himself from the grand master of the idea of structuralism by Isozaki developing an architectural grammar for the fluid, variable, ephemeral, temporary, that which only exists for a time – in the knowledge of ephemerality, as Hiroshima and Nagasaki have taught all the world. But at the same time, like Tange, he became a representative of the “New Building”, a representative of a post-war modern Bauhaus philosophy of the East, which distilled a moment of the utopian out of shock.
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Isozaki’s buildings can be recognized by the fact that they are not recognizable as buildings by Isozaki
Thus Isozaki, who never developed a style but always had an attitude towards it, was spared the strange nature of star architecture (of which he undoubtedly belonged) and its always on the Unique selling proposition thoughtful, cipher-like signature emblems. Unlike the many great colleagues and the few great female colleagues in the jet set of architecture that was passed around the world, Isozaki never developed anything like an architectural signature that could be identified right away. However, this corresponds to a building that is intended to produce different things in different places at different times for different uses and different expectations. Something appropriate. And not some kind of business card architecture as the one “style”. Which would then only be what another style could be. How can you recognize buildings by Isozaki? Because they are not recognizable as buildings by Isozaki.
Just three years ago, Isozaki was awarded the Nobel Prize in Architecture, the Pritzker Prize. His life’s work, which “defies stylistic categories,” as the explanatory statement puts it, was never the work of an architect who “follows a trend” – but “follows his own path”. What a sentence in an epoch of architecture that only seems to consist of trends, but hardly ever shows a way out of the jungle of its codes.
Isozaki’s most important buildings include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Arena Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona and the Thessaloniki Philharmonic. Isozaki also built in Germany – the buildings of the Berliner Volksbank on Potsdamer Platz obviously don’t show his handwriting either. Isozaki once answered the question about role models with Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Another time with Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. From this Ledoux there is the claim that architects are the rivals of the creator – and the titans of the world. Who build something for an eternity that lasts exactly the blink of an eye. Isozaki was not a rival to the creator, but one who never stopped making the world a better place. By the way, he didn’t give in as an architect.