Toward an Archipelagic Reimagining of a Networked Architecture: Isozaki Arata's Collaborative Praxis of the Lost Decade

Abstract: This essay explores how the eminent Japanese architect Isozaki Arata (1931–2022) turns to the archipelagic to address a constellation of problems concerning architecture's place within the emergent urban and media ecologies of the 1990s. Putting Isozaki's transdisciplinary theoretical writings and built works into dialogue with his collaborations with the philosopher-critic Asada Akira (1957–‍), I show how the archipelagic acts as a resource for imagining an always already networked architecture in terms of a heterogeneous and interpenetrating multiplicity. In such an archipelagically imagined multiplicity, architectural nodes (islands) maintain their distinctness against homogenizing flows by cultivating "extra-contexts" that resist transparent communication. In this way, I gesture toward the implications of Isozaki's archipelagic architectural praxis for ecocriticism, media theory, and other related discourses at their intersection.