Word: isozaki
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...dichotomies are no mere zero-sum stalemate, sensibility vs. sensibility ad infinitum. There is meaning to this madness. Masterly, highly original work is being produced by 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...
...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...
Aida is one of the few middle-aged stars of Japanese architecture who neither apprenticed nor studied under Tange. He taught at Tokyo University when Maki and Kisho Kurokawa were Tange's students there in the '50s; Kurokawa and Isozaki worked in Tange's office in the late '50s and early '60s. In fact, Tange and Isozaki, 56, are a good point-counterpoint embodiment of the generational change in Japanese design. Tange is a reserved pillar of society. Isozaki, whose good friends (like Fashion Designer Issey Miyake) jokingly call him Iso-san, is an impish glamour...
Tange, says Isozaki, "is of the generation all but dedicated to the job of translating Japanese tradition in terms of modern architecture, and introducing the result to the outside world." Tange's buildings of the '50s and '60s were in the then obligatory International Style but given bits of national flavor -- Japanese-accented Esperanto, with upswept roof edges and exposed concrete beams formed into abstract "timbers." Isozaki's buildings of the '70s and '80s are the converse: instead of Japanizing a universal architectural style, he takes inspiration and ideas from anywhere he chooses, his odd, exciting syntheses unbound either...
...Isozaki's postmodernism was not fueled, like that of many Western architects, by a hankering to reproduce a particular, seductive historical style. The forms and fragments in his work are not cute or ready-made. Instead, he is an antirationalist, a form-follows-intuition designer whose deft play (tricks of perspective, false facades) tends toward the baroque but whose work comes off as anything but fusty. He is drawn to elemental geometries -- cubes, cylinders -- and natural materials, but he seldom leaves them basic or pure. He pulls together polished granite with curved glass with concrete, and makes columns short...