The death of Arata Isozaki further distances our lived twentieth century, and increasingly connects and immerses us in the mysterious chronology and inventive, technological new language of the rapid two-thousands, now well into its third decade. An inevitable timer of time's passage, it takes away the present, us, people and things, and draws us more and more into a future which, amidst vertiginous leaps forwards, innovations, furies and crises, despondencies, pessimisms, is shaping up as an enigma. This enigma transforms the old, exhausted concept of individuality and demands a new concept of personality, capable of preserving, much, if not all, of the memory of what has happened, opening the doors to an unfolding that fades the similarities of history, taking on the guise of the unforeseen. Every certainty is fleeting, declining in favour of a subsequent certainty. Some perceive this situation as a danger and a loss, while others, underestimating neither one nor the other, choose it as an opportunity, fantasy, experimentation, innovation.
This opening strikes me as a metaphorical portrait of this great Japanese figure (1931-2022) who is gone in body, but remains permanent in spirit and works. He was capable of surprising us with his quality in blending the sublime East with Western rationality, almost as if to confirm the need to strive towards the infinity that lies beyond the horizon line, whilst keeping our feet firmly planted in the here and now. His project for the Uffizi in Florence, and the Allianz skyscraper in Milan, for example, speak to a stylistic signature open to an architecture of logos and topos, balancing, at times on the one, at times on the other, in a flexible, malleable way, as the ideality of a design process should be conceived as art and not as mere utility. In this sense, his status as an archistar was fully embraced and fully translated into works that are polysemic, attractive, and desirable. Isozaki's legacy is that of Hadid, Libeskind, Piano, Fuksas – brilliant personalities who “create” language, invent unexpected geometries, whilst knowing how to converse with the science of lightness and the strong power of engineering, ensuring that even that which cannot and should not fly, except in imagination and through labyrinthine paths, manages to take flight. Thank you, Arata!
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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