Arata Isozaki

Arata Isozaki (1931-2022) was one of the greatest Japanese archistars of the 20th century. His very long career culminated in the 2019 victory of the Pritzker Prize, the highest honor in architecture, and was marked by the tenacious will not to tie himself to a single style or fashion, in a continuous personal evolution in constant dialogue with the trends of the moment. His career began in the 1950s under the protective wing of the great brutalist architect Kenzo Tange, another great Japanese archistar known throughout the world. After a decade spent working in the master's studio, in 1963 he decided to set up his own business to found the Arata Isozaki Atelier and approached the style of the Metabolist Movement, a visionary emerging movement that strongly characterized the theoretical debate of Japanese architecture in those years. Having quickly dissociated himself from certain excesses of metabolism, starting in the 1970s Isozaki arrived at a more explicit reference to the historical models of Western architecture, often deconstructed in an alienating sense through an overlapping of elements typical of Japanese architecture. The point of arrival of this vision is the project for the Tsukuba Center Building (1979-83), an expression of a revisited historicism that brings him closer to the great masters of Post-Modernism in vogue in those years. Also in the 1980s he had his most significant experiences in the field of product design with the furnishings designed for the Memphis collective led by Ettore Sottsass and the jewels created for Cleto Munari, all tinged with a typically post-modern sense of irony. In the meantime his architectural research approached maturity with works such as the MOCA – Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1986) or the astonishing Art Tower Mito in Tokyo (1986-1990). In the last years of his life he finally established a strong relationship with Italy, founding in 2005, in partnership with Andrea Maffei, a foreign branch of his studio and giving life to projects such as the Palasport Olimpico in Turin (2005) or the Allianz Tower, protagonist of the new CityLife district in Milan (completed in 2015).