Kisho Kurokawa, Japanese Architect Who Pioneered Organic Structures, Dies at 73 : obituary by NY Times

architect/artist: Kisho Kurokawa
obituary title: Kisho Kurokawa, Japanese Architect Who Pioneered Organic Structures, Dies at 73
obituary compilation no: T-22
format: Text
date: October 21, 2007
appeared in: The New York Times
writer: Robin Pogrebin
photo by: Serge Ligtenberg/Associated Press

courtesy: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/world/asia/21kurokawa.html

Obituary Details:

(image info: Kisho Kurokawa in 1999, at the wing he designed for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. )

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Kisho Kurokawa, the influential Japanese architect and theorist behind projects like the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia, a futurist complex penetrated by a rain forest, died on Oct. 12 in Tokyo. He was 73.

The cause was heart failure, The Associated Press said, quoting a hospital spokeswoman.

Mr. Kurokawa was one of the youngest founding members of Japan’s Metabolist movement, which advocated an organic, renewable architecture that could evolve through the addition of clip-on modular units. This school of thought emerged around 1960, partly as a response to concerns about overcrowding, and culminated in the Osaka World Expo of 1970, where three buildings by Mr. Kurokawa were showcased.

Countering the machine aesthetic of International Modernism, the Metabolists saw buildings as living cellular organisms that could evolve and expand over time. Mr. Kurokawa conceived of houses floating on a lake and a tower patterned on DNA molecules. Among the most notable Metabolist projects he realized was his Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972) in Tokyo’s Ginza district, in which the apartments were replaceable pods. In 1977 he designed the Capsule Inn Osaka, considered the first pod hotel.

Even as he championed this progressive form of architecture, Mr. Kurokawa honored traditional Japanese design, both in his execution of details that are virtually invisible and in a reliance on natural tones and textures. He was later associated with a movement called Symbiosis, which championed an architectural synthesis of global cultural influences and viewed buildings as living entities that could enrich human beings.

The son of an architect, Mr. Kurokawa was born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1934 and witnessed the destruction of his city by American bombers in World War II. He received his bachelor’s degree at Kyoto University in 1957 and earned a master’s degree at the University of Tokyo, studying under the modernist architect Kenzo Tange.

After several modest commissions, Mr. Kurokawa founded his own architectural firm in 1962. His commissions over the years included the Sony Tower in Osaka (1976), the National Ethnological Museum in Osaka (1977) and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (1989).

His only project in the United States was the Sporting Club at the Illinois Center in Chicago (1990), whose facades he designed in a slender gridlike pattern. In a salute to Chicago, he topped the building’s towers with windmill-like sculptures.

He also mapped out a master plan for Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan, in the 1990s, devising a system of linear zoning rather than a radial urban core.

Mr. Kurokawa also designed the Chinese-Japanese Youth Center in Beijing (1990) and the new wing of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (1998).

His designs were not always well received. His addition to the Van Gogh museum, for example, was considered by many to be highly alien to Amsterdam: a curving granite facade, a convex titanium roof, a wall lined with aluminum protrusions.

“Viewed from the Museumplein, the annex looks somewhat bunkerlike and, even though Mr. Kurokawa said he was seeking symbiosis of environment and architecture, it appears to make little attempt to integrate with its surroundings,” Alan Riding wrote in The New York Times in 1999. “On the other hand, viewed from the museum or the public path separating the two buildings, where nothing but the annex can be seen, it is both striking in appearance and welcoming.”

His 1998 design for the Kuala Lumpur airport won global praise, particularly for his integration of a transplanted tropical rain forest.

His last major Japanese project was the National Arts Center in central Tokyo, consisting of seven enormous rooms.

In the twilight of his life, Mr. Kurokawa grappled with setbacks. He ran for governor of Tokyo in April and lost to his longtime friend Shintaro Ishihara, and he was defeated in elections for the upper house of Japan’s Parliament in July. He learned that the Nakagin Capsule Tower would be torn down; the Sony Tower was demolished last year.

He is survived by his wife, Ayako Wakao, a film actress who also ran unsuccessfully for Parliament, and two children from an earlier marriage: a daughter, Kako Matsuura, an artist, and a son, Mikio Kurokawa, a photographer.

In a 1992 article in The New York Times about Japanese clients’ importing Western architects, he said that novelty alone could not sustain an architect’s appeal.

“Like the television advertisement depicting Arnold Schwarzenegger slurping instant noodles,” Mr. Kurokawa said, “at first it’s unbelievable, but then the impact wears off.”

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Correction: October 23, 2007

An obituary on Sunday about Kisho Kurokawa, the influential Japanese architect and theorist, misspelled the given name of his widow. She is Ayako Wakao, not Akayo.

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