ART REVIEW : Arata Isozaki: A Tribute to the Master Builder

Of all the arts, architecture has the most direct practical effect on daily urban life. We live and work inside it. It contains all the other arts in its museums, concert halls and theaters. It is womb, cave and sepulcher. Not only does it protect and nurture (or stifle and repress), its arrangement determines our movements and its look affects our sense of well-being. Are we welcome here or excluded?

Architecture’s most visible monuments endure to tell the future the nature of the material past. Paris speaks of grandiosity, London of graciousness. A prominent architect shapes the myth of history in the most tangible way and is thus a crucial cultural figure.

Today, Arata Isozaki is regularly ranked among the dozen most important architects in practice. His buildings girdle the globe from Japan across the States and into Europe. In Los Angeles, his Museum of Contemporary Art on Bunker Hill has become a symbol for the new L.A., trumpeted by its boosters as the multicultural capital of the Pacific Rim.

To celebrate the artist’s 60th birthday, MOCA Director Richard Koshalek co-organized a retrospective exhibition covering 30 years of Isozaki’s career in 35 models, 200 drawings and sketches and films being shown on three astonishingly crisp high-definition television monitors. Titled “Arata Isozaki 1960/1990 Architecture,” it runs through June 30. After closing here, the miniaturized extravaganza will visit five Japanese museums and Paris’ Centre Georges Pompidou. MOCA is getting good at this sort of thing. Along with its Frank Gehry retrospective and its didactic show of L.A.’s Case Study Houses, it is becoming something of an architect’s museum.

It is even learning to compensate for the glitch built into all architectural exhibitions, namely the lack of real buildings. Since Isozaki built the museum, that’s less a problem here and, besides, the models are exquisitely crafted and convincing.

Convincing of what?

Architecture slices so many directions it’s hard to count the ways. In his recent book, “City of Quartz,” left-wing sociologist Mike Davis sees MOCA as part of a “recently-emerged university-museum mega-complex” whose purpose is to create a “cultural monumentality to support the sale of the city to overseas investors and affluent immigrants.”

See? Architecture slices many ways.

In slightly less conspiratorial terms, Isozaki can be seen as a front runner in the new internationalization of architecture. The Miesian glass block previously represented the now-discredited “international style.” It has given way to Post-Modernism. Geographically international, the new wave has also broadened its scope to sop up the historical influence of virtually all architecture from every time and place. Maybe not Alaska. You don’t see too many igloos. Not yet.

In stylistic terms, Isozaki can be seen for much of his career as a kind of transitional figure from traditional modernism to eclectic Post-Modernism. Early in his career, he designed some radical post-Hiroshima science-fiction buildings like his 1960-62 “Clusters in the Air.” As we see in the model, this unrealized vision proposed a Tokyo as drastically new as Le Corbusier’s 1923 “Plan Voisin,” which suggested tearing down Paris and replacing it with something resembling Park La Brea Towers. Needless to say, the French were not amused.

Isozaki’s buildings have always been less radical than his “Blade Runner” fantasies or his proposal for a “Responsive House” with membrane walls that will pouch out around the furniture. It has a suspended orb of a bedroom that provides a womb without a view. Early buildings like the Oita Medical Hall have the classic brutalist style of a Louis Kahn. Isozaki’s detailing is as meticulous as that of the conservative I. M. Pei and the architects share a fondness for glass pyramids.

The pyramid, like those that provide skylights for MOCA, suggests Isozaki’s attraction to basic forms--linking him directly to old minimalist internationalism again. His early ‘70s design for the Gunma Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts is based on a series of cubes so rigorous it could be the work of American minimalist sculptor Sol Lewitt. What sets Isozaki apart again is that his lexicon of elemental geometric shapes is broadened to include the pyramid, barrel vault and the sphere. The latter was probably inspired by the work of the 18th-Century French architect Etienne-Louis Boullee, whose later visionary projects used spheres symbolically, as in a grandiose proposal for a monument to Isaac Newton. Boullee and Isozaki share a combination of leanings to Neo-Classicism and eccentricity.

Isozaki is nothing if not a mannerist. He loves doing things like putting a barrel vault up on legs, curving it into a question mark or making a rather Palladian small museum resemble a freight train. In his design for a Disney corporate building near Orlando, Fla., the joke seems to be an entrance canopy shaped like Mickey Mouse’s ears. A second look reveals a bigger joke in a huge truncated cone that forms the building’s lobby. It is open at the top and has a horizontal blade that functions as an Oldenburgesque sundial, casting its shadow on the inner court. Buried under this amiable playfulness is a suggestion that the cone is a nuclear reactor funnel and the blade is a sword of Damocles hovering over corporate heads.

There is often something vaguely ominous in Isozaki’s designs. A girls school in Japan has beetle-browed cantilevers that seem to stare out at the students like some severe samurai overseer. He has designed everything from dwellings to sports arenas. Something fortress-like haunts them all. Maybe that simply reflects a tendency to inwardness that shows in much of today’s security-minded building. But there is something else, something Japanese.

Some of Isozaki’s buildings could be updated fortified Shogun castles. Look at his Musashi-kyuryo Country Clubhouse. It’s right out of a Kurosawa movie. In other works, the effect of Japonisme is so subtle as to be invisible. That is partly because Isozaki is so eclectic. His design for the Tsukuba Center is almost all inspired by Italian Baroque. But adapting and improving on foreign products is a traditional part of the Japanese aesthetic. Isozaki just does it with a crooked, somewhat ambiguous smile.

Part of the reason Isozaki’s Japaneseness is illusive is because it reflects contemporary rather than traditional Japan. In his work, traditional love of fine craft has evolved into a fascination with the high tech we see in his Barcelona sports arena or his festival hall for Expo 70 in Osaka. The spontaneity of Zen has modernized into a quirkiness that shows in his strange recent “Art Tower Mito.” The 330-foot-high observation tower is said to be a combined homage to Brancusi and Buckminster Fuller, but in some ways it looks like a gigantic piece of twisted movie film. In some ways it looks like a robot cobra ready to devour the town.

Architecture slices many ways. In the simplest terms, Isozaki’s work may speak to the future of that time when the influence of Japanese culture became what the CEOs like to call a “world-class” phenomenon.

* The Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., to June 30. Closed Mondays. (213) 621-2766