Arata Isozaki has made nearly a hundred buildings, sixty-year career. Tuesday, march 5, the jury of the Pritzker architecture prize has awarded the architect of the 87-year-old for his work. It is the eighth japanese architect awarded the prestigious architecture prize, often referred to as the Nobel prize of architecture, after Kenzo Tange (1987), Fumihiko Maki (1993), Tadao Ando (1995), Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (2010), Toyo Ito (2013) and Shigeru Ban (2014).

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The architect, urban planner, designer, and theorist, born in 1931 in southern Japan, is influenced both by the East and the West, through the various currents of the movement, métaboliste of the 1960s, to the postmodernism of the 1980s. Among his buildings include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1986), the National Convention Center in Qatar (2011), the Kitakyushu City Central Library (1974) in the prefecture of Fukuoka in Japan, the Palais St Jordi in Barcelona (1990) built on the occasion of the 1992 Olympic Games.

Arata Isozaki is considered to be one of the first architects of this country to be turned towards the West, in particular, through numerous study tours. «I was thinking all the time: what is architecture?», he says about these journeys, which led him to the United States, China and the Middle East. He explained that this interest in diversity was, in part, born of his youth, marked by a mixture of traditionalism in japanese, and the influence of american culture, brought to the archipelago by the american soldiers during the occupation after the war. Very early he was interested by the contrast between the codes of the aesthetic and of the beauty of these two countries.

The architect to the hair, always plated in the rear, the eternal collar shirt Mao, has carried out projects on four continents, from sports arenas to office buildings, to museums. This philosophy is an extension of that of his mentor, Kenzo Tange, modernist architect, who has also spun off its buildings in the world. In addition to its cosmopolitanism, Arata Isozaki is known for never having sought to assert a style identified, showing himself to be rather anxious to integrate his architecture places his achievements. «My pleasure is to create different things, not repeat the same thing,» he explained, in November 2017, at the specialized site ArchDaily. «For the media or identity and all of these things, it is very disturbing», slipped it with an air of mischief.

Very attached to «My», a japanese concept that corresponds to a human sense of space

The two great lines of force of the work of Arata Isozaki, the cosmopolitanism and the desire to blend into an environment, find their illustration at the Palau Sant Jordi. Completed in 1990, in the run up to the olympics, which she has hosted the competitions of gymnastics, the enclosure is partly buried to appear only as an element of the hill of Montjuic, which overlooks Barcelona. As for the style of the building, it’s a mixture of the inspiration of the inverted tiles, or «espanta bruixes», typical of Catalonia, with a rounded shape, like the dome often used in buddhist architecture.

In Japan, among the great feats of arms Isozaki is the municipal art gallery, Kitakyushu (1974) or the municipal hall of Kamioka (1978), who demonstrates his eclecticism: the first one goes all in angles and straight lines, when the second is rounded and curves. The japanese architect is also very attached to «My», a japanese concept that corresponds to a human sense of space and the perception of this space as separating two objects.

Arata Isozaki sign as one of the architectural works, the strongest of la Coruña, the museum of science or «Domus», which was inaugurated in 1995. Composed of six miles of slate, it takes the form of a large sailing tour around the bay of Riazor. In 2013, on the occasion of the festival Arknova of Lucerne, the Japanese designed a concert hall inflatable and nomadic, in collaboration with the artist anglo-indian Anish Kapoor, whose work «Dirty Corner » in Versailles (or The Vagina of the Queen) has been controversy in 2015.

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Stephen Breyer, president of the jury and member of the supreme Court of the United States, stressed the qualities of the architect, his «deep knowledge of the history and architectural theory while being close to the avant-garde,» reports The World.

Arata Isozaki is the successor to the Indian Balkrishna Doshi, winner of the Pritzker prize last year at the age of 90 years. According to a press release issued on Tuesday, the prize will be awarded in may at a ceremony in Paris, whose precise date has not been communicated.

Domus, the science museum of La Coruña, and her veil made up of 6000 slates, which opened in 1995. Wikimediacommons/Marcus