ABSTRACT
Like Hi-Red Center and Neo-Dadaist Organizers, architect Isozaki Arata imagined a set of spatial and temporal coordinates irreducible to the linear urban formations Tange proposed for Tokyo. As opposed to the dominant streak of urban planning, Isozaki grounds his architectural design on unknowable city users whose unpredictable trajectories in time exceed planning. Architecture for Isozaki is not what unifies and organizes the many but what fractures the people into a crowd with multiple futures and pasts. As part of his aesthetic and ethical paradigm premised on elusive intentions of the other, Isozaki turns the potential of deceptive surfaces that conceal the material substrate beneath. The resulting discourse of optical trickery as part of the larger kankyō geijutsu (environment art) movement critically sheds light on the ongoing need to reflect on the unsettling and enigmatic multitude as the foundation of democratic ethics and architecture.
