Kenzo Tange
From Hiroshima to Tokyo, he defined the look of Japan
By Jim Frederick
During World War II, American firebombing reduced some 40% of Japan's total urban area to rubble. From this horrifying destruction came a historic burst of reconstruction. It was an extraordinary opportunity for a young, enterprising architect to apply his vision to a newly blank slate, to define the literal shape of postwar Japan. His name was Kenzo Tange.
Born in 1913 to a poor family in Osaka and educated at the University of Tokyo, Tange's first major commission was the Peace Memorial Park at Hiroshima's ground zero in 1949. His concrete museum, cenotaph and gigantic public square managed to be both mournful and modern, elegiac yet elegant. Over the next half-century, Tange continued to give physical expression to Japan's recovery, his curriculum vitae nothing less than a checklist of the nation's most iconic buildings. Each was executed in his coldly beautiful, international, ruthlessly current style. Among them: the National Gymnasium Complex for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (hailed in his citation for the coveted Pritzker Prize as "among the most beautiful structures built in the 20th century"); the master plan for the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka; 1991's Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building; and 1996's Fuji TV Building, with its silver globe suspended high above Tokyo Bay.
Before he died in 2005, Tange had also earned respect as a teacher, mentoring such heavyweights as Fumihiko Maki and Arata Isozaki. What does modern Japan look like today? It looks the way Tange decided it should.
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April 28, 2003 |
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October 11, 2004 |
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October 10, 2005 |
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