Versatile architect who first came to prominence in the 1960s with visionary schemes for the postwar rebuilding of Japan

From building heroic works of concrete brutalism in the 1960s, to pieces of playful postmodernism in the 1980s, and curious organic-tech structures in the 2000s, few architects have been as versatile and enduring as the Japanese designer Arata Isozaki, who has died aged 91.

Impossible to categorise with any single stylistic label, Isozaki was a constant presence in global architectural culture for the second half of the 20th century, after he first came to prominence in the 60s with visionary, almost sci-fi schemes for how Japanese cities might be rebuilt after the second world war.

His 1962 project, City in the Air, proposed great branching megastructures sprouting above the congested streets of Tokyo, imagining tree-like clusters of apartments, offices and transport nodes linked in a futuristic aerial network. It was at once ancient and modern: the interlocking forms recalled the wooden sashihijiki bracket structures of traditional Buddhist temples, while the urban forest was to be connected by a computer network, prefiguring the internet by two decades.