Japanese architect Arata Isozaki is dead. Isozaki died on Wednesday at the age of 91 on the Japanese island of Okinawa, according to the Kyodo news agency, citing his office. Isozaki was one of the most important architects in his country. He implemented more than a hundred construction projects worldwide.
His most famous buildings include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona and the ice hockey stadium in Turin, northern Italy. Isozaki and other architects built the Daimler-Benz skyscrapers on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.
Isozaki was considered a visionary architect. In 2019 he won the Pritzker Prize, the highest award in his field. With his buildings, which “defy stylistic categories”, Isozaki never followed trends, but always his own way, the jury wrote at the time. Part of his method was the Japanese concept “Ma”, which can be understood as a space, a break or an opening in construction and design.
Isozaki was born in 1931 in Ōita on the island of Kyūshū in southwestern Japan. He was always interested in the question of how architecture and a city could be built from scratch, he said at the 2019 Pritzker Prize ceremony.
