ARATA ISOZAKI

2019 Laureate Arata Isozaki was born in Oita, Island of Kyushu, Japan in 1931 before the
onset of warfare II. He is a Japanese architect or urban designer.

He developed a mode which reflected both Japanese traditions and Western post-modern.
Isozaki also wrote about architecture and taught in several universities.
He was awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in 1986 and the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2019
TRAINING
He studied with Kenzo Tange, one in all Japan's leading modern architects, at the University
of Tokyo from 1950 to 1954.
So when he finished working for Tange and decided to start his own design practice form
zero he wanted to differentiate himself. This attitude is keep with native Japanese practices
that stress collaboration and cooperation, instead of competition, among professionals.
So, he got rid of everything that is identified as Tange’s and ended up with a completely
neutral system.
INFLUENCES
He said as an architect he follows the western culture but he grown up in Japan and he
grown up learning Chinese culture so he understand the space or the sensibility of the fall
surrounding our environment, this is the Asian way to developing the space.
His work in the late 1960s was influenced by the Metabolism school, but mannerism is
discernible in the exaggerated expression of the structural members.

Isozaki said ‘it is common to approach design through form, but approaching a design
through its space was not something he had considered before, so he wanted to give it a try.
Isozaki is known for the fluidity of his type of architecture. “I couldn't dwell upon one style,”
he said. “Change became constant. Paradoxically, this came to be my very own style.” a
number of his works just like the Kitakyushu Central Library are the epitome of Japanese
brutalism. He’s also known to mix postmodernism and metabolism with technology.
PHILOSOPHY: TIME SPACE EXISTENCE
Time, space and existence. These three concepts sketch out the perspective of looking
around the world.
He accentuates the importance of Ma – "between object and object" – in his approach to
articulating matter in terms of both space and sound. Arata Isozaki said extravagance is a
complete silence. Nothingness is extravagant. So according to him:
• No time and no space. But we've got ‘ma’: between object and object.
• And in-between spaces, sound and sound, there are silences apart. So according
Arata Isozaki’s this is called ‘ma’.
• Space is important; in – between spaces is more important.
Wherever he used ‘ma’ he used the concept of space: Chronos plus ‘ma’ and void plus ‘ma’
TIME = Chronos + ma
SPACE = Void + ma
Isozaki discusses the Japanese concept of the space and time that exists in-between things,
called "ma."
The natural distance between two or more things existing during a continuity" or” the natural
pause or interval between two or more phenomena occurring continuously. Thus the word
MA does not describe the recognition of time and space as different serializations Rather, in
Japan, both time and space are measured in terms of intervals.
Originally, the ideogram for MA consisted of the pictorial sign for "moon" - not the current
day "sun” - under the sign for "gate".
This ideogram, depicts a fragile moment, when the moonlight streaming are often seen from
the doorway. The aesthetics of the MA, translatable with the ambiguous terms of "break”,
“between”, therefore indicates a little of two-dimensional space, closed the door, but also a
little of your time, within which the moon appears, because, as noted by the identical
architect Arata Isozaki, "the space was perceived only in relevancy the flow of your time.
“The traditional Japanese concept of ‘ma’ is reflected in whole Japanese culture, from
building system to martial arts and also the isometric representation of physical space, this
provides a unique way of reading the architecture and also the landscape.
STYLE AS SOLUTION
His pleasure is to form various things, not the identical thing.

But his identity is to form a difference on every occasion not in one single style but always
according to the situation, according to the environment, an architectural style as a solution and
every time its different.

SUBMITTEDBY: ADITI CHANDEL

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