TOKYO — Kisho Kurokawa, the Japanese architect who led the so-called "Metabolism Movement" and based his designs on themes including ecology and recycling, died yesterday, a Tokyo hospital spokeswoman said. He was 73.

Kurokawa died of heart failure, said Keiko Yamazaki, spokeswoman at the Tokyo Women's Medical University Hospital, where he was hospitalized Tuesday with an intestinal ailment.

Kurokawa, who made his world debut in 1960 at age 26, led a style known as the Metabolism Movement, advocating a shift from "machine principle" to "life principle" in his work and architectural designs based on themes including ecology, recycling and intermediate space.

His major works include the National Ethnological Museum in Tokyo, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia that encompasses palm trees and rainforest, the National Art Center in Tokyo's posh Roppongi that looks like a wavy curtain, as well as the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Kurokawa's design of the Kuala Lumpur airport won the 2003/2004 grand prix by Italy's Dedalo-Minosse International Prize, and was also certified as a sustainable airport by the United Nations' Green Globe 21 in 2003.

"(Kurokawa) demonstrated his genius to open a new passage to architecture," Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said yesterday.

Born in Japan's central city of Nagoya in 1934, Kurokawa graduated from Kyoto University's architecture department before earning a doctoral degree from Tokyo University under Kenzo Tange, who was hailed as the architect of some of the most beautiful structures of the 20th century. Tange, who designed the twin gymnasiums with sweeping roofs like upside-down ships' hulls for the 1964 Tokyo , died in 2005 at 88.

Kurokawa received the Gold Medal from France's Academy of Architecture in 1986, and most recently the Chicago Athenaeum Museum International Architecture Award in 2006.