AKIS

One of the most spectacular and important unbuilt projects of the 20th Century was Arata Isozaki's "Clusters in the Air" scheme in 1962 in which he proposed cantilevering housing units from a central spine in a far more radical fashion than the plan by Santiago Calatrava for South Street in New York that ignited architectural imaginations more than four decades later. Isozaki's plan was the most futuristic of several schemes that would be advanced based on the notion of "megastructures" and the potential of lowering housing costs through industrialized capsules.

"Like many of his contemporaries," the authors noted, "Isozaki trained with Kenzo Tange at Tokyo University and was a product of the postwar rebuiling years....But of all those contemparies, he has made the most significant break with a technocratic Modernism, embracing Postmodernism with zest. In the 1970's, Isozaki was in the Modernist mainstream, producing buildings such as the Gunma Museum of Modern Art, Takasaki (191974), based on a cubic grid reaching out over the surrounding parkland and reflecting pool. As the decade progressed he struggled more and more with orthogonal orthodoxy and began experimenting with new shapes, especially the circle, which he used in both plan and section. By the time he came to build the Tsukuba Civic Centre in the early 1980s at a new town outside Tokyo, which freely quotes everything from the neoclassical to Robert Venturi, he was clearly in a new phase of his life and work."