Kenzo Tange

Architectural Review, The, May, 2005 by Dennis Sharp

The influence of Kenzo Tange, who died on 22 March, aged 91 years, has permeated Japanese architecture for well over half a century. He became the leading Modernist architect in the country from the 1950s and taught generations of younger proteges in Tokyo University, MIT and Yale. But above all he led by built example, becoming in a sense the barometer of change in postwar Japanese modern architecture. He produced a vast number of projects throughout the islands and, as his international reputation grew, outside the country as well.

Tange graduated from Tokyo University in 1938 but resumed his postgraduate studies there during the war before beginning his professional career in the office of Kunio Maekawa who had worked for Le Corbusier in his Paris office.

Tange became committed to the Modern Movement ideas of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mics van der Rohe. He attempted to combine these strands of inspiration with a more diffuse interest in Japanese traditional culture. Thus he gave Japanese architecture itself a new impetus by opening up the International Style rather than closing off a tradition. This is probably best seen in his first and universally praised building for the Hiroshima Peace Centre and Museum of 1949-56 which with its mix of Functionalist and local forms rose above the area of devastation left by the atom bomb.

In 1957 he completed the Tokyo Metropolitan Government offices in Yurakucho, a functionally organized government building with a steel frame, yet elevated on pilotis displaying an obvious to debt to both Mies and Le Corbusier. It was these buildings and a succession of civic projects in Ehime, Hiroshima and Shizuoka that led to Tange's appointment as the architect for the Japan 1964 Olympics. Located in Tokyo, the pair of Olympic buildings he designed between 1961 and '64 were to bring him worldwide recognition, arguably achieving too great symbolic significance. He wrote of them: '... for some time I had devoted thought to communications between architectural space and the human spirit ... symbols are crystallisations of images of historical periods in the evolutions of civilizations'. In a sense this symbolisation was a reaction to the removal of the American forces from their occupation of the Olympic site in Yoyogi Park. Tange produced two separate structures, the main gymnasium for swimming and a smaller gymnasium for basketball and tennis. They were among the most extraordinary structures seen in the Olympic movement with their enormous membrane roofs, a type that had been experimented with both by Le Corbusier at the Brussels Expo 1958 and by Eero Saarinen with the Yale Hockey Stadium, but not at this scale. In 1972 Frei Otto developed a similar system for the Munich Olympics. The Olympic structures had also pushed Tange's work more towards the organic and further along from the rigidity of the International Style. Le Corbusier's Philips Pavilion had a part to play in this development and probably also influenced the shaped profile and suspended roof of St Mary's Cathedral, Tokyo, 1961-64.

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In 1959 Tange attended the CIAM Team 10 conference at Otterloo and presented a paper there on the work of the young Metabolists for whom he was to become the father figure. He showed projects by Kikutake and Kurokawa and most importantly his own Utopian project for a city over Tokyo Bay. It was an urban scheme developed with students from an earlier MIT project for 25 000 inhabitants in Boston harbour. Reyner Banham in his Megastructure book claimed that the Tokyo Bay project was: 'the (megastructure) movement's major masterpiece'. He claimed it 'made Japan the fount of inspiration for architectural and urban visionaries for most of the sixties'. No mean compliment when you consider that Banham thought it better than the 'conventional Modernism' of Costa's Brasilia!

A distinct change in Tange's approach appears soon afterwards with the design of the Yamanashi Communications Centre (1961-67) which was much more fragmented than anything that emerged from the Corbusian years. He was seen eschewing the International Style and echoing the new trends towards flexibility, growth, change and indeterminacy. At about this time, international recognition and honours mounted up, with Gold Medals from the RIBA (1965), the AIA (1966), from Italy (1970) and France (1973), honorary memberships and degrees proliferated, from Japan and Europe to the countries of Latin America. The latter part of his career saw him take on projects from many parts of the world including China, Australia, Europe, Saudi Arabia, Africa and South America.

Tange's reputation had taken a bit of a knock with the completion in 1991 of the massive Tokyo City Hall, in the skyscraper district of Nishi-Shinjuko, which was seen as a kind of fortress of government power. It was the largest single group of buildings ever to be assembled on one site in Japan and is overwhelming in its size and symbolism. It is an unsettling contrast to the existing grain of Tokyo's confused, chaotic yet intensely busy and cramped character. However, all was redeemed with the completion of his huge double tower structure in 1996 for the Fuji TV company. This building is situated on an artificial island in the Bay, comprising two huge blocks 210m long and 120m high. These are connected by a web of enclosed walkways over which is suspended a 32m diameter shiny titanium faced sphere housing a popular tourist observatory and cafe. There could not be a better platform to view and contemplate some of the accumulated work of Tokyo's--indeed Japan's--most influential contemporary architect.