“It was traumatizing for Iso,” Richard Koshalek, the museum’s director at the time, said in an interview for this obituary. “The building committee had assumed that its name would give the project international prestige, while it could demand a portrait building in the self-image its members wanted. He did not agree.”
Mr. Isozaki ultimately 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 a void full of possibilities, into a Western ensemble of shapes straight from the geometry book. “That gallery was worth the whole building,” said Mr. Gehry at the opening.
The project launched Mr. Isozaki into an international career spanning four decades, which he pursued in many countries in a variety of styles. He built the colorful, whimsical postmodernist Team Disney Building in Orlando, Florida; for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, he designed the more austere and symmetrical 18,000-seat Sant Jordi pavilion.
One of his most unexpected designs was the Qatar National Convention Center in Doha. The roof is supported by a phantasmagorical pair of gigantic concrete “trees” with swelling trunks and thick branches, the surreal forms contradicting the otherwise rectangular, modernist structure. As in many of his buildings, he used the detail to break through the building’s overall control system – the irrational mixed with the rational. The Domus (La Casa del Hombre), his science museum in Coruña, Spain, deviates from the language of his earlier buildings, with a smoothly curving sail-like facade fronting an otherwise cubic stone structure, all atop a rocky and wild hillscape.
A connoisseur of the radical in the arts – early on he was drawn to jazz, Tokyo neo-Dadaists and John Cage – Mr Isozaki was, as one critic noted, a “guerrilla architect” who sparked controversy within an architectural culture that largely coincided with modernist standards. He was often a guest judge at competitions and sought out the most unconventional projects. In 1983, he advocated a seemingly unbuildable entry for a sports club in Hong Kong by then-unknown young Iraqi British architect Zaha Hadid. The bold mood launched her career.
In the 1970s, the language of modernism erupted as postmodernists questioned functionalism in architecture and the West’s fundamental belief in the unity of the Renaissance. For Mr. 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 humour. He designed the shape of the Fujimi Country Club in Oita as a question mark: why actually play golf in Japan?
