Arata Isozaki, who died on Wednesday at 91, at his home in Naha, on the Japanese island of Okinawa, was born into a country that would be destroyed by war. “His first experience of architecture was the absence of architecture,” said Tom Pritzker, head of the foundation that awarded Isozaki the Pritzker Prize in 2019. Studying the subject was an act of faith, a step toward filling the void that was Japan after 1945. When he became an architect, in the 1950s, ongoing austerity meant he had to be resourceful. Though always a modernist, he was open to many approaches. “Change became constant,” he said in 2019. “Paradoxically, this came to be my own style.”
That may also explain the scope of his career, which brought him greater success abroad than any other Japanese architect of his generation. His clients included the Aga Khan, King Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain, the ruling family of Qatar, the former Disney chief Michael Eisner, and the hotelier Ian Schrager. His best-known buildings ranged from the Palau Jordi stadium for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics to the 1983 Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles to the interior of the Palladium night club in New York (1985). Before his death, he was working on projects in Italy, Kazakhstan and Vietnam.
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