Arata Isozaki

In 1968 a series of uprisings that shook university campuses and cities worldwide also revolution­ized aesthetic thought, partly by challenging the value of art, architecture, and design. In May of that year, Isozaki designed a large-scale installation with mobile screens, ambient sound, and projections on drawings and photographs for the Milan Triennale. Titled Electric Labyrinth, it was subsequently destroyed by protesting students and professors.

Based on Electric Labyrinth, this photocollage critiques societies in crisis and their failed responses to history by depicting an outstretched horizon and skeletal structures littering a grid of streets. The desolate panorama invites contemplation of the violence that inscribes Japanese, if not global, landscapes and architecture. The fragments here are former spaces of inhabitation incinerated by an atomic bomb—wreckage that Isozaki called “dead architecture.” Like his contemporaries, he sought to remove hierarchies and ideological impediments from the built environment; here the architect merged scenes of annihilation with images of broken buildings that once connoted institutional and economic power. For him, the restitution of the city, and, by extension, of society, required “the operation of the imagination.” Isozaki’s vision is both history lesson and portentous tale of what might become of us if we are not checked. The city’s remnants have buckled into its already degraded ground; architecture thus records acts of destruction and the collective histories of failed geopolitics, destructive technologies, and fragile societies in collapse.