Tokyo: World-renowned Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, known for his avant-garde designs, died of old age at his home in Naha in Okinawa Prefecture, southernmost Japan, on Wednesday morning. He was 91.

After graduating from the Department of Architecture at the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Engineering in 1954, Isozaki, a native of the southwestern Japan city of Oita, studied under the late leading Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. Isozaki established his atelier in 1963.

Leading the postmodern architecture movement with his radical design style, Isozaki received high recognition especially for his spatial designs for art museums and theaters.

He was also known as an architecture commentator and was active in other fields such as philosophy, arts and design.

In 2019, Isozaki won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, dubbed the Nobel Prize of architecture. “He has brought together East and West, not through mimicry or as a collage, but through the forging of new paths,” said the Pritzker prize jury’s citation.

His major works include the former Oita Prefectural Library in Oita, now called Art Plaza, the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art in the city of Kitakyushu in Fukuoka Prefecture, southwestern Japan, the Tsukuba Center Building in the city of Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, eastern Japan, the Sant Jordi Stadium, used for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

JIJI Press