Beginning from the completed form of architecture and going backward to extract fundamental concepts reveals abstract forms such as the cubes of the Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, the cylinders and semicylinders seen in the Kitakyushu Central Library and Kamioka Town Hall, the cuboids of the Kitakyushu City Museum of Art, and the regular tetrahedrons of Art Tower Mito. Isozaki’s Reduction series shaves off elements that were added to the architecture during the design process or after completion, including three-dimensional internal spaces, experiences and views that only come to life through the intervention of human actors, and interactions with the surrounding environment. By reducing the architecture to the state in which the image first took form in the architect’s hands, and visualizing that state, Isozaki is also re-interpreting his earlier work.
Architecture does not include topographical characteristics, the smell of life, or the background vulgarity of utility poles and hoardings. It consists only of spaces with pure geometry and structures with single forms. That simple state can be fixed in silkscreen prints. The Reduction Series presents the architecture in its primitive form, reduced to only geometrical bodies, frames, and to primary colors and values.
