Kenzo Tange

Total Projects from Kenzo Tange: 3

Japan's cities had been reduced to ashes by the end of the Second World War - occupied and erased (utterly in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The country's insular culture, already crumbling under the forward-looking Meiji Restoration, had been broken down once and for all. Out of the carnage emerged Kenzo Tange, just graduated and in a perfect position to direct the rebuilding of the country on Modernist principles - even if these were largely alien to what had gone before. Tange's success was to bring something dis-tinctively Japanese to the International Style's grasp for universality. His first great task was directly connected to the destruction: the creation of the Hiroshima Peace Centre (1950) and Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (1952).

Tange was born in Osaka in 1913 and brought up in Imabari, Shikoku Island, until, inspired by Le Corbusier (through an apprenticeship in Kunio Maekawa's architectural office), he began graduate studies at the University of Tokyo in 1942. Through his subsequent teaching and the establishment of the Tange Laboratory he helped mould the next generation of Japanese architects, including Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa and Arata Isozaki. He established his own practice in 1961 but has remained a committed teacher both in Japan and, as a visiting professor, across the world.

It was Tange's pair of lotus-like elliptical gymnasia for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics that announced the first full flowering of his approach. Swooping semicircular roofs are held up by steel cables that create eleva-tional curves to match the curves of the plan. The forms have been likened to samurai helmets.

Tange has also been linked with the promotion of megastructures and incorporated these in his 1960 Tokyo Plan, which proposed extending the city using linked artificial islands. Although never implemented it was hugely influential. Tange has since been invited to engage in planning projects in Bologna, Sicily (a 'new town' for Catania) and Paris. Such con¬cerns with the larger scale and the interlinking of a city's transport and other networks appeared to ally Tange with Japan's Metabolist movement, which perceived buildings and cities as living organisms with life cycles, but he has always stood slightly apart from the group, looking for a 'union of technology and humanity'.

After producing a rich output of functionalist buildings across Japan, Tange flirted briefly with Postmodernism in the 1980s. The Yokohama Museum of Art (1989), with its decorated facade and overscale pyramid-topped porch, is a good example, although its Rationalist plan links the scheme back to his earlier Hiroshima project.

Kenzo Tange Associates has grown enormously and many critics consider much of the recent output of his office to be corporate fodder lacking the spark of his earlier work. But the oversized grids, struts and suspended polished sphere of the Fuji Television Building in Tokyo (1996), while gimmicky, still pack a punch, and the sheer scale of the paired towers of the 1991 Tokyo City Hall complex is staggering. Tange's practice is still building on a large scale across South-East Asia but appears increasingly marginal to the directions architecture is now taking internationally.

website: www.ktaweb.com

Featured Projects

	Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Address: 1-2 Nakajima-cho, Naka-ku, , HIROSHIMA - Japan Architect: Kenzo Tange Category: Cultural \| Museums



$St. Mary\'s Cathedral$	St. Mary\'s Cathedral Address: 3-15-16 Sekiguchi , TOKYO - Japan Architect: Kenzo Tange Category: Religious Places



	Yoyogi National Gymnasium Address: 2-1, Jinnan, Shibuya , TOKYO - Japan Architect: Kenzo Tange Category: Sport