Isozaki was born in Oita on the island of Kyushu and grew up in the era of postwar Japan. Isozaki completed his schooling at the Oita Prefecture Oita Uenogaoka High School (erstwhile Oita Junior High School).
Isozaki was born to an upper-class family, and he witnessed firsthand as a teen the devastation of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Interested in the rebuilding of such cities, he went on to study architecture at the University of Tokyo. In 1954, he graduated from the University of Tokyo where he majored in Architecture and Engineering. This was followed by a doctoral program in architecture from the same university. Upon graduation, he became an apprentice for nine years to Tange Kenz?, a leading Japanese architect of the postwar period. During that period Isozaki also worked with a design team known as Urtec (Urbanists and Architects). He was somewhat influenced by the Metabolist movement, a Brutalist group that combined a concern for modern technology and utilitarianism. In 1963 Isozaki formed his own design studio. Qatar National Convention Center, Doha, Qatar
For nearly two decades, Mr. Isozaki built only in Japan, and primarily on the southern island of Kyushu, where he was born. But in 1980, the nascent Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles commissioned him to design its structure. That project nearly foundered when a building committee forced Mr. Isozaki into a design he repudiated in the press. ?I had to quit or be fired,? he said at the time.
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