Word: architects
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...designers of all kinds. Arata Isozaki's Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is one of the most fetching new buildings in the U.S. Tadao Ando's severe, uncompromising architecture won him Europe's prestigious Alvar Aalto Prize last year, as well as the respect of young architects all over the world. Maki, an architect who has lived and worked in the U.S., thinks this is unquestionably the Japanese moment. Given the "exceedingly high level of our craftsmanship and technology" and the "current flowering of all manner of architectural ideas in Japan," Maki says, "Japan is the place...
...creative boom: "Japanese design is more flourishing and diverse than ever before." At no time in the roughly 130 years that Japan has traded with the West have its applied arts been so influential abroad. "I've lived with Asian influence all my life," says Eugene Kupper, an architect and UCLA professor, but "today Japan is in the forefront. It's the most exciting it has ever been." While tradition clearly informs some of the best new Japanese design, the current creative burst is not primarily backward looking. Indeed, Japanese design seems singularly, giddily unfettered. Not only are architects...
...hard determining fact of all Japanese culture, including design, is the country's size and island insularity. Land in Tokyo goes for as much as $846.7 million an acre. Thus an architect's treatment of space takes on a sort of moral dimension. Isozaki was condemned by some compatriots for the spaciousness of an art museum he designed in the early '70s. Now that he is busy with American commissions, Isozaki himself is a bit thrown by the comparative Yankee boundlessness. "In the U.S.," he says, "even where I had thought I might be taking up too much space...
...Architect Kenzo Tange violated the native tenets of compactness with his grandiose plan for an improved metropolis that would extend out over Tokyo Bay. Today, at 74, he is still pushing it. But now Tange, the winner of this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize, is at the center of another bitter controversy, over his design for new Tokyo metropolitan government offices. With a main section 797 ft. tall and an estimated construction cost of $780 million, this project would be the biggest, most expensive Japanese building ever -- too big and too expensive, his critics say. Even more disconcerting to many...
Tadao Ando, 45, is the most influential figure among Japan's baby-boomer architects. Combative, ascetic, a radical traditionalist, he is the perfect maverick: after wandering across the U.S. in the '60s, he aspired to a professional boxing career before becoming an architect. He is something of a Zen zealot. He hates "automated buildings with all manner of electronic convenience." He hates posh materials. "Concrete, far cheaper than marble, can achieve a far greater spiritual sense of wealth," he says. Indeed, most of his 90 buildings are constructed of concrete. Ando is thus maintaining a tradition: large-scale modern buildings...