Kenzo Tange

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(b Osaka, 4 Sept 1913). Japanese architect, urban planner and writer. He graduated in architecture from the University of Tokyo (1938) and worked briefly for Kunio Maekawa. From 1946 to 1974 he taught at the university, becoming professor emeritus after 1974; he also received a PhD there in 1959. Many Japanese architects who later gained prominence, such as Arata Isozaki, Kisho Kurokawa and Fumihiko Maki, were once members of his university studio, the centre of his design activities until 1961 when he established the office Kenzo Tange & Urtec, Urbanists and Architects, in Tokyo. Tange was perhaps the most important architect in Japan during the 1950s and 1960s, times of national unity and established social agenda with which his heroic vision and hierarchical, structured architecture were in tune. His career was marked by early success with winning entries for competitions to design a memorial to the creation of the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere (1942; unexecuted) at Mt Fuji and a Japanese cultural centre (1943; unexecuted) in Bangkok, which brought him considerable attention. Reflecting the nationalist sentiment of the time, these were interpretations of traditional Japanese architecture, complete with pitched roofs. The scheme for the memorial called for a linearly-organized urban satellite for Tokyo that anticipated his well-known urban plan (1960) for Tokyo Bay.

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The Japanese architect Kenzo Tange (born 1913), a student of Le Corbusier, was one of the first modern architects in Japan and played an important design role in postwar rebuilding of Japanese cities.

Kenzo Tange was born in 1913 in the town of Imabari on Shikoku, the smallest of the four principal islands in the Japanese archipelago. He received his degree in architecture from the University of Tokyo in 1938 and returned to the university to do graduate studies in urban planning and design between 1942 and 1945. The four intervening years were spent in the Tokyo architectural firm of Kunio Maekawa, who had worked in the Paris office of the great Swiss architect Le Corbusier and who was one of a small number of modern architects in Japan at the time. Thus, at the end of World War II Tange was equipped to play a major design role in the reconstruction of Japan's war-ravaged cities.

In 1949, after participating in planning studies to aid the rebuilding of numerous towns and cities, Tange won a national competition to design a Peace Park in central Hiroshima, the area that had been directly hit by the atomic bomb dropped from an American plane on August 6, 1945. The complex, comprising a memorial, a museum, a community center, and an auditorium-hotel building, was completed in 1956. The free-standing memorial monument, a dramatic saddle-like arch made of reinforced concrete, is a 20th-century statement that recalls a building type in which the tombs of prehistoric Japanese rulers were placed. The museum, a long, horizontal structure of glass and concrete raised above ground on concrete columns (called pilotis), is reminiscent of buildings by Le Corbusier and also of ancient Japanese prototypes (specifically, the Shosoin in Nara, a building that housed the Imperial Treasury and dates back more than 1, 000 years). This theme of synthesizing modern architecture with traditional symbolism characterized the first phase of Tange's career.

Throughout the 1950s Tange was engaged in designing a variety of civic projects - town halls, libraries, auditoriums, sports centers. One of the more notable of these was the town hall complex he designed for his home town, Imabari, which was completed in 1959. These buildings, including an auditorium, an office center, and the town hall proper, show Tange's increasing skill at manipulating the expressive possibilities of exposed concrete. The auditorium, with just a few projecting square windows on a high concrete wall shadowed by a dramatically projecting roof, is especially powerful. These strong structures were arranged compactly around a public plaza, a spatial form not to be found in traditional Japanese cities. Tange's interest in such communal spaces dates back to his university studies of the Greek agora - the place, as Tange wrote, where the "citizen moved from the private realm to establish connections with society."

In 1960 Tange published his monumental "Plan for Tokyo, " a stimulating - and widely publicized - theoretical exercise which foresaw a need to restructure the 20th-century city. Based in part upon an analogy with nature - "the various architectural works will form the leaves, and the transportation and communications facilities the trunk of a great tree, " Tange wrote - the plan envisioned a vast radial overlay of buildings and roadways above and beyond traditional Tokyo. Although somewhat terrifying in scale, the buildings, structures of concrete, shown in photographs and models were physically impressive, even beautiful. None was ever built, although Tange's stupendous Yamanashi Press and Broadcasting Building (1966) in Kofu, a medium-size city in central Japan, inherits something of the plan's monumental vision. The building comprises an array of horizontal units plugged into, and supported by, 16 huge concrete columns whose hollow cores contain the needed support services (stairwells, elevators, air-conditioning plant, and rest rooms). A feature of the building, as of the Tokyo plan, is its ability to be added to without change to the fundamental structural system (this in fact was done in 1975).

Tange's best-known buildings are the two national gymnasiums erected in Tokyo for the 1964 Olympic Games (the first to be held in Asia). The roofs of these two circular buildings indelibly recall the massive forms of traditional Japanese temples, but they are, also, altogether contemporary in form and technique. These roofs, suspended by cable from massive concrete pillars (a single pillar for the smaller structure, a pair for the larger), consist of prestressed steel nets onto which are attached welded steel plates. The drama of these forms continues in the interiors - bold, elegant, welcoming open spaces illuminated by a combination of artificial with natural light.

From the mid-1960s onward Tange received widespread international attention and commissions. His firm, called the Urbanists and Architects Team (URTEC), provided the master plan (1965) for the reconstruction of Skopje, Yugoslavia, after its devastation by an earthquake and did important planning studies for cities and regions in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe as well as in Japan. Among Tange's more important later architectural works is the Akasaka Hotel (1982) in central Tokyo, a bi-winged structure whose gleaming skin of aluminum and glass demonstrated a decisive turn away from the aesthetic of exposed concrete.

In 1986 Tange again won a competition to design the New Tokyo City Hall Complex, as he had done in 1952. As all of his best work, the new design presents an impressive image: twin skyscraper towers, adorned at the top with a panoply of communications equipment, rising cathedral-like over the Shinjuku district in western Tokyo. He also began work on the Otsu Prince Hotel, the United Nations University in Tokyo, and the Place d'Italie in Paris, France (completed 1991). An American example of his work is the American Medical Association Headquarters Building in Chicago, Illinois, completed in 1990.

Tange has received numerous awards, including the Medal of Honour, Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Grand Prix, Architectural Institute of Japan (1986); the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1987); and in 1993, he received the prestigious Japanese Praemium Imperiale award for lifetime achievement in the arts.

Further Reading

The first decades of Tange's work are fully treated in Kenzo Tange, 1946-1969, edited by Udo Kultermann (1970). His architecture and ideas also are dealt with in books by Robin Boyd, New Directions in Japanese Architecture (1968), and Botond Bognar, Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Its Development and Challenge (1985). He wrote a short autobiographical work, Kenzo Tange, published in Switzerland (1987). Articles about him and his work also appear in special issues of Space Design (January 1980, September 1983, 1987 and 1991).

Japanese architect. After graduating from Tokyo University (1938) he joined Maekawa's office, where he absorbed the influences of Le Corbusier. In the early 1940s he began to draw on allusions to traditional Japanese architecture, and in 1949 won the competition for the Hiroshima Peace Centre Community Centre and Museum (1949–56), his first major building, which was presented to CIAM in 1951 and announced his arrival on the international architectural scene. Then followed several buildings in which Tange developed forms using up-to-date technology, and quickly achieved status as a leader of the Modern Movement in his country, arguing for a synthesis between Japanese and Western design. His Kagawa Prefectural Offices, Takamatsu (1955–8), relied for its effect on the expression of posts and beams, but the Sports Arena, Takamatsu (1962–4), and St Mary's RC Cathedral, Tokyo (1961–4), were more dynamic, the last with a basic cruciform plan and paraboloids superimposed. This theme was developed further in the National Gymnasium, Tokyo (1961–4), seating 15,000 people protected by a tensile catenary roof-structure.

Tange's work has involved research into town-planning, including a design for the expansion of Tokyo based on rapid-transit systems, areas of high-density housing, and a major extension of the urban fabric into the sea at Tokyo Bay (published as A Plan for Tokyo, 1960). He also developed schemes for multi-purpose blocks linked in various ways. His Yamanashi Press and Broadcasting Centre, Kofu (1964–7), has 16 cylindrical services- and stair-towers acting as huge columns, with floors spanning between them according to their functional requirements. This, and the Tokyo plan, were potent influences on Metabolism. In the 1970s his designs developed strong affinities with architecture in Europe and the USA. The dynamism of his earlier work was superseded by a refinement of detail, and later buildings included the Bulgarian (1974), Iranian (1975), and Turkish (1977) Embassies, the Tokyo Prince Hotel (1983–7), the City Hall Complex (1986–92), and the United Nations University (1990–2), all in Tokyo, and the Japanese Embassy in Mexico City (1976–7. He obliquely criticized Functionalism, stating that only the beautiful can be functional.

Bibliography

• Altherr (1968)
• R. (1976)
• Bettinotti (ed.) (1996)
• Bognar (1985, 1995)
• Borrás (1975)
• R. Boyd (1962)
• Kalman (1994)
• Kulturmann (ed.) (1970)
• Kulturmann et al. (1989)
• Miyake et al. (eds.) (1989)
• Mühll et al. (1978)
• Placzek (ed.) (1982)
• Tange (1960, 1970)
• A. White (1990)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office, Shinjuku, Tokyo

1964: St. Mary's Cathedral (Tokyo Cathedral), Tokyo

Kenzo Tange (丹下健三, Tange Kenzō^?, September 4, 1913 – March 22, 2005) was a Japanese architect, and winner of the 1987 Pritzker Prize for architecture. He was one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, combining traditional Japanese styles with modernism, and designed major buildings on five continents. Kenzo Tange was also an influential protagonist of the movement structuralism. He said: "It was, I believe, around 1959 or at the beginning of the sixties that I began to think about what I was later to call structuralism", (cited in Plan 2/1982, Amsterdam).

Contents 1 Biography 2 Selected projects 3 External links 4 References

Biography

Tange was born in Sakai, Osaka in 1913. He moved to Hankou, then to Shanghai and later England, with his banker father, back to Japan in 1920. Tange was strongly influenced by Le Corbusier's books and thought to be an architect in his secondary school days.

In 1935, Tange attended at the Department of Engineering, the University of Tokyo, where he studied architecture, completed his degree and worked as a professional architect at the studio of Kunio Maekawa. Tange worked a few years there and left to go back to the University of Tokyo to study postgraduate course in 1941. Tange became an assistant professor and opened Tange laboratory in 1946. In 1963, he was promoted to professor of the Department of Urban Engineering. As a professor, his students included Sachio Otani, Kisho Kurokawa, Arata Isozaki, and Fumihiko Maki who have inherited Tange's architectural style and his philosophy.

In 1949, Tange won the architecture competition for design of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima city, four years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. His design for Peace Memorial Park owes much to Le Corbusier and Tange envisioned it as the city's 'spiritual core'.^[1] One reason Tange gave for applying for the job was that he had studied in the city as a secondary student.

In 1961, Tange became the principal of the firm Kenzo Tange & Urtec (the present day Kenzo Tange & Associates),^[2] and then won international fame for his design for the gymnasium for the 1964 Summer Olympics held in Tokyo. His Pritzker Prize citation described it as "among the most beautiful buildings of the 20th century."

He was also known for his "Tokyo Plan" of 1960, which proposed a radical redesign of the city. Although not fully implemented, it influenced architects worldwide. In the 1960s he also designed the new master plan for the capital city of the Republic of Macedonia Skopje, which was heavily damaged by the 1963 earthquake. This plan was also only partially implemented. Tange received AIA Gold Medal in 1966, the Order of Culture in 1980, and the order of the Sacred Treasures in 1994.

In 2005, his funeral was held in one of his works, Tokyo Cathedral.

Selected projects

BMW building in San Donato Milanese

• 2005: Hwa Chong Institution Boarding School, Singapore
• 2003: The Linear - Private Apartments, Singapore
• 2000: Tokyo Dome Hotel
• 2000: Kagawa Prefectural Government Building the main offices, Takamatsu, Kagawa
• 1998: WKC Centre For Health Development, Kobe, Hyōgo
• 1998: University of Bahrain, Sakhir, Bahrain
• 1996: Fuji Television Building, Odaiba, Tokyo
• 1992: UOB Plaza, Singapore
• 1991: Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, Shinjuku
• 1987: American Medical Association Headquarters Building, Chicago, Illinois, USA
• 1986: OUB Centre, Singapore
• 1986: Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• 1982: Central Area New Federal Capital City of Nigeria, Nigeria
• 1979: Hanae Mori Building Aoyama, Tokyo
• 1977: [Sogetsu Kaikan][1] Aoyama, Tokyo
• 1970: Site of Expo '70, Suita, Osaka
• 1966: Master plan for rebuilding of Skopje, Republic of Macedonia, then part of Yugoslavia after the 1963 earthquake
• 1964: Yoyogi National Gymnasium for the 1964 Summer Olympics, Tokyo
• 1960: Kurashiki City Hall, Kurashiki, Okayama
• 1958: Kagawa Prefectural Government Building the east offices, Takamatsu, Kagawa
• 1957: (Former) Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, Yūrakuchō
• 1955: St. Mary's Cathedral (Tokyo Cathedral) (Roman Catholic), Tokyo
• 1955: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Hiroshima

1955: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum at the Peace Memorial Park of Hiroshima.	1958: Kagawa Prefectural the Government Building east office	1964: Yoyogi National Gymnasium in Shibuya, Tokyo.	Centro Direzionale, business centre, in Naples
1987: American Medical Association Headquarters Building, Chicago, United States	1991: Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, Shinjuku	1996: The Fuji TV headquarters in Odaiba is known for its eccentric architecture.	2000: Kagawa Prefectural the Government Building main office

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Kenzo Tange

• Official website
• Profile of Tokyo Metropolitan Buildings

References

1. ^ From caption, from Guardian picture gallery at http://arts.guardian.co.uk/pictures/image/0,8543,-10405154681,00.html
2. ^ http://www.aia150.org/aw_gm_1966.php

v • d • e Pritzker Prize laureates Philip Johnson (1979) · Luis Barragán (1980) · James Stirling (1981) · Kevin Roche (1982) · I. M. Pei (1983) · Richard Meier (1984) · Hans Hollein (1985) · Gottfried Böhm (1986) · Kenzo Tange (1987) · Gordon Bunshaft / Oscar Niemeyer (1988) · Frank Gehry (1989) · Aldo Rossi (1990) · Robert Venturi (1991) · Álvaro Siza Vieira (1992) · Fumihiko Maki (1993) · Christian de Portzamparc (1994) · Tadao Ando (1995) · Rafael Moneo (1996) · Sverre Fehn (1997) · Renzo Piano (1998) · Norman Foster (1999) · Rem Koolhaas (2000) · Herzog & de Meuron (2001) · Glenn Murcutt (2002) · Jørn Utzon (2003) · Zaha Hadid (2004) · Thom Mayne (2005) · Paulo Mendes da Rocha (2006) · Richard Rogers (2007) · Jean Nouvel (2008) · Peter Zumthor (2009)

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