Kenzo Tange
Kenzo Tange designed the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima and the Olympic halls in Tokyo in 1964. He combined Japanese tradition with Le Corbusier’s concrete and became the first Japanese to receive the Pritzker Prize.
Kenzo Tange was born in 1913 in Osaka and grew up in Imabari and partly in China. He was inspired by pictures of Le Corbusier’s work and studied architecture at Tokyo Imperial University. He worked for Kunio Maekawa, who had himself worked for Le Corbusier. During the war he won competitions with monumental proposals. In 1946 he became a teacher at the University of Tokyo, where he led a laboratory that trained several of Japan’s leading architects.
In 1949 Tange won the competition for the Peace Park in Hiroshima, with the Peace Memorial Museum on pilotis and an axis towards the ruin of the exhibition hall, today known as the Atomic Bomb Dome. He designed the Kagawa Prefectural Office, where concrete beams imitate Japanese timber construction, and St Mary’s Cathedral in Tokyo. For the 1964 Olympic Games he built the halls at Yoyogi with suspended roofs. He also made a vision for Tokyo with a city extending out over Tokyo Bay. He was a mentor to the Metabolists, a group of young architects who wanted to build cities that grew like organisms.
Tange received the Pritzker Prize in 1987. In his later years he built a great deal abroad, including in the Middle East, Africa and Singapore, and the new City Hall in Tokyo. He died in 2005. He is regarded as the architect who brought Japan into international modernism and showed that it could be united with a tradition of its own. His pupils, among them Arata Isozaki and Fumihiko Maki, became leading architects.