Arata Isozaki, a world-renowned Japanese architect who was a late recipient of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2019, died this Wednesday at the age of 91 in Okinawa (southwestern Japan) where he lived, several Japanese media announced this Friday.
Very prolific and cosmopolitan, Isozaki was characterized by never having sought to affirm a particular style, being rather concerned with integrating his constructions as best as possible into their environment.
“My pleasure is to create different things, not repeat the same thing,” he explained in November 2017 to the specialized ArchDaily site.
“Because of the media or identity and all those things, it is very worrying,” he slipped mischievously.
Many buildings around the world.
Among his best-known works are the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1986), which launched his international career, the multipurpose Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona, built for the 1992 Olympic Games, and even the Qatar National Convention. . Center (2011), a convention center in Doha with giant columns in the shape of tree branches.
He has also built numerous cultural buildings in Japan and China, apartment towers in Bilbao (Spain), the colorful administrative headquarters of Disney in Florida and the Allianz Tower skyscraper in Milan (2015), also called “Isozaki Tower”.
Born in 1931 in Oita, on the southern island of Kyushu, Isozaki was marked like his entire generation by World War II, during which most Japanese cities were destroyed by US bombing.
He grew up between Japanese traditionalism and the influence of American culture, brought to the Japanese archipelago during the post-war occupation. This led him to take an early interest in the contrasting aesthetic codes in the East and the West, and to want to establish bridges between the two.
Source: BFM TV
