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Arata Isozaki: Unbuilt

by John McGee

For an architect, Arata Isozaki is lucky—many of his designs have been built. But even the luckiest architects are restricted by the time, money and compromises required to complete the design and construction of a building. For every structure raised, countless others never leave the drawing board. 

Wooden models of Isozaki's Shinjuku Joint Core 
Project (front) and Clusters in the Air (back) 
(Photo: Nacasa & Partners 2001)

"Unbuilt," at TOTO's Gallery MA in Nogizaka, traces the surprisingly rich variety of Isozaki's vision over his 40-year career through a small but choice selection of models and drawings of unfinished projects. 

Isozaki (b. 1931) emerged in the postwar era alongside Kurakama, Maki and Shirohara to become one of Japan's most famous architects. Today, he is known for his East-West synthesis and unique take on Post-Modernism, e.g. Ibaraki Prefecture's Tsukuba Centre Building (1983) and Art Tower Mito (1990), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1984-86) and the Team Disney Building in Florida (1989-91). 

Unfinished designs result for various reasons: failed bids or competition proposals, capricious developers who run out of money or patience, or the designer's flights of fancy—experiments never meant to be built, only to test new conceptual models or engender debate. "Unbuilt" covers all of these circumstances, selecting a few representative designs from each decade of Isozaki's career, the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s. 

Many of Isozaki's 1960s concepts used infrastructural cores to maximize urban density. One of the most striking models in the show, "Clusters in the Air," is a large-scale housing proposal (1960-62) in which a series of massive vertical cores were to be planted in urban centers. Long "branches" jut perpendicularly from these "trunks." Rows of mobile home-like residential units attached to the bottom of these armatures ("leaves") form a hive of hanging communities and complete the arboreal metaphor. Similar core-based models were considered for the Marunouchi and Nishi-Shinjuku business districts. 

In the '80s, the design for the New Tokyo City Hall (1986) amassed an encyclopedia of conceptual and practical solutions in creating a medium-rise, horizontally oriented, "democratic" form complete with cathedral-like interior spaces, hanging gardens, and openness to the adjacent Central Park. While Kenzo Tange's winning design—a tall, vertically-oriented, hierarchical prison of bureaucracy now bookending Nishi-Shinjuku—may ultimately be more fitting for Tokyo, Isozaki's failed bid encapsulates his progressive vision, promising to inform and inspire the citizens rather than dominate them.

Over the last decade, Isozaki worked on two projects in China, one in Shenzen, the other in the South China Sea. The latter, a capitalist Utopia set on an artificial island near Macao, is illustrated by large wall-mounted drawings and an uncharacteristically organic model made by twisting colored wire between nails, then covering the wire network in goopy white plaster. 

The most unfortunate aspect of this show is that all of the captions and labels are in Japanese. However, TOTO produced two small catalogs, one in English and one in Japanese, to accompany the show. Though the English version only teases a minimum conceptual thread from each project, it is a useful guide to unraveling the intriguing principles that inform them.

The Arata Isozaki: Unbuilt Architecture exhibition was held Feb-Mar 2001 at Gallery MA in Minami-Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan.

©2007 John McGee

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