NEW YORK, NY.- Arata Isozaki, a prolific Japanese architect, urban planner and theorist who received a belated Pritzker Architecture Prize at the age of 87, died Wednesday at home in Okinawa. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by his longtime companion, Misa Shin, in a statement.

Practicing at a time of seismic shifts in architectural practice and theory, Isozaki was both an agent and messenger of change who never repeated himself in his work. Each of his buildings was unique and escaped signature.

In scores of major structures built in a dozen countries, Isozaki absorbed and reinterpreted Eastern and Western traditions, fluently importing and exporting architectural influences. In a half-dozen books, he explained Japan’s rarefied building customs, emphasizing the nation’s intangible spirit.

An ambassador between cultures, Isozaki became an international power broker in his field; his colleague Tadao Ando called him “the emperor of Japanese architecture.”

Isozaki positioned himself as a member of an avant-garde that practiced outside architectural convention. He first captured international attention in 1962 with “City in the Air,” a theoretical proposal for treelike megastructures branching like a forest canopy over Tokyo, their limbs — cantilevered to the limits of practicable engineering — encrusted with changeable living capsules. Japan’s dense, rapidly expanding cites needed further densification, and “Metabolists” such as Isozaki believed that cellular biological growth provided a model for architecture.

For nearly two decades, Isozaki built only in Japan, and primarily on the southern island of Kyushu, where he was born. But in 1980, the nascent Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles commissioned him to design its structure. That project nearly foundered when a building committee forced Isozaki into a design he repudiated in the press. “I had to quit or be fired,” he said at the time.

But failure in Los Angeles would have forced him to retreat to Japan humiliated. Heeding the advice of Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry, Isozaki won the support of a group of museum trustees, who rescued his design and, with it, both the project and his reputation.

“It was traumatizing for Iso,” Richard Koshalek, director of the museum at the time, said in an interview for this obituary. “The building committee had assumed that his name would bring the project international prestige, while it could demand a portrait building in the self-image its members wanted. He didn’t acquiesce.”

Isozaki finally built the museum as a village of platonic solids clad in a richly textured red Indian sandstone, with large pyramidal skylights illuminating the serene galleries below. The first gallery — voluminous, glowing, visually still — introduced the Japanese concept of ma, sometimes described as an emptiness full of possibilities, into a Western ensemble of forms straight from the geometry book. “That gallery was worth the whole building,” Gehry said at its opening.

The project pivoted Isozaki into a four-decade international career, which he pursued in a range of styles in many countries. He built the colorful, fanciful postmodernist Team Disney Building in Orlando, Florida; for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, he designed the more sober and symmetrical 18,000-seat Sant Jordi Pavilion.

Among his most unexpected designs was the Qatar National Convention Center in Doha. Its roof is supported by a phantasmagoric pair of giant concrete “trees” with swelling trunks and thick branches, the surreal forms contradicting the otherwise right-angled, modernist structure. As in many of his buildings, he used the detail to violate the building’s overall system of control — the irrational cohabited with the rational. The Domus (La Casa del Hombre), his science museum in Coruña, Spain, departs from the language of his earlier buildings, with a smoothly curved saillike facade fronting an otherwise cubic stone structure, all set atop a rocky and wild hillscape.

A connoisseur of the radical in the arts — early on, he gravitated to jazz, Tokyo neo-dadaists and John Cage — Isozaki was, as one critic observed, a “guerrilla architect” who engineered controversy within an architecture culture that largely conformed to modernist norms. Frequently a guest juror at competitions, he sought out the most unconventional projects. In 1983, he championed an apparently unbuildable entry for a sports club in Hong Kong by then-unknown young Iraqi British architect Zaha Hadid. The daring vote launched her career.

In the 1970s, the language of modernism ruptured as postmodernists questioned functionalism in architecture and the West’s fundamental belief in Renaissance unity. For Isozaki, architecture became a cultural practice — in his words, “a machine for the production of meaning.” He designed buildings with symbols and references, imbuing them with irony and even a teasing humor. He designed the shape of the Fujimi Country Club in Oita as a question mark: Why, after all, golf in Japan?

Isozaki emerged as a force driving Japan’s architectural new wave while at the same time rooting his designs — what he sometimes called his “perfect crimes” — in Japanese spiritual traditions. He interpreted and territorialized Western styles and philosophies with Japanese notions of absence, emptiness, shadow and darkness.




Planting a Japanese flag in Western ideas reframed them, establishing rights of ownership. At a time when postwar Japan was rebuilding itself and sensitive to Americanization, confronting Westernization with Japanese tradition was a form of cultural resistance.

By commingling influences, his buildings and discourse established common ground outside national boundaries. In 1983, he wrote “Katsura Villa: Space and Form,” effectively elevating the imperial retreat in Japan to the status of the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome and the Parthenon in Athens. His traveling show, “Ma: Space/Time in Japan,” which came to the Cooper Hewitt in New York in 1979, introduced the Japanese concept of ma. In 2003, he published “Japan-ness in Architecture,” calling attention to the simplicity, serenity, austerity and humble attitude of Japan’s architectural traditions.

Emphasizing “Japan-ness” also inoculated Isozaki against accusations that an internationalized Japanese architect had surrendered his cultural identity to the West, becoming foreign in his own country. Isozaki consciously foregrounded the image of his nationality in public, usually wearing kimonos in ceremonies and official portraits. When a coalition of Japanese architects challenged Hadid’s stadium design for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Isozaki raised the national flag: The design, he said, looked “like a turtle waiting for Japan to sink so that it can swim away.” (Hadid accused the architects of hypocrisy, maintaining that they were happy to build abroad but resisted foreigners in Japan.)

Arata Isozaki was born July 23, 1931, in Oita, a city on Kyushu, the eldest of four children of Soji and Tetsu Isozaki. His father was a prominent businessman who ran a successful transport company and wrote haiku.

In 1945, when he was 14, Arata witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima on the shore opposite his hometown. Three days later, southwest of Oita, Nagasaki was bombed.

“I grew up on ground zero,” Isozaki said when he won the Pritzker Prize in 2019. “There was no architecture, no buildings, and not even a city. So my first experience of architecture was the void of architecture, and I began to consider how people might rebuild their homes and cities.”

The transience of cities and the eventuality of their destruction eventually became the basis of his work. “The future city lies in ruins,” he once wrote.

He graduated with a degree in architecture from the University of Tokyo in 1954 and received a doctorate in architecture there in 1961. He apprenticed with eminent modernist Kenzo Tange through 1963 and then opened his own office, Arata Isozaki & Associates, in Tokyo.

In 1972, he married Aiko Miyawaki, a Japanese sculptor who brought an international coterie of radical artist friends, including Hans Richter and Man Ray, into their marriage from the years she had spent in Paris. She dressed in black jumpsuits, unusual for the time, and he in the black crinkled outfits of fashion designer Issey Miyake, a friend.

Isozaki soon turned away from the modernist movement’s utilitarian emphasis on technology in favor of culture as a force driving architectural form. In rapid succession, he used bold geometric shapes cast in concrete to design a public library, a medical center, a bank headquarters and two museums on Kyushu, importing styles ranging from French and English brutalism to Italian rationalism to gridded modernism. By using platonic solids originating in the Mediterranean — cylinders, cubes, spheres and pyramids — he said he “felt I could make more of an impact on the Japanese situation.”

In addition to Shin, Isozaki’s survivors include a son, Hiroshi, from an earlier marriage, and a grandson.

Despite his prominence in Japan and his status as an eminence in the field, the Pritzker Prize long eluded Isozaki, even though he had consulted with the Pritzker family on its formation and had long served on its jury. In 1995, in a little-known dispute, the Pritzker committee debated whether to give the prize to Isozaki or Ando.

Ando prevailed. According to Gehry, then a member of the jury, Isozaki blamed him for the slight, unraveling a friendship that dated from the Museum of Contemporary Art controversy. Four other Japanese architects from three firms — all younger, one of them a former Isozaki employee — would go on to win the prize, before Isozaki.

Asked about being passed over, however, Isozaki told associates that he didn’t want the award: In his view, a Pritzker concluded a career, and he did not want to stop working. But he finally accepted the gold medal in 2019, in the vaulted, cathedrallike spaces of the vast Orangerie at Versailles, in the presence of Qatari royalty and le tout Paris of architecture.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, then chair of the Pritzker jury, delivered an appreciation: “Isozaki is a pioneer in understanding that the need for architecture is both global and local — that those two forces are part of a single challenge.”

Isozaki looked like an ambassador of Japan-ness at the Versailles court as he accepted the award wearing the full-length, high-collared black robe of a man of letters, his white hair tied in a short ponytail.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.