Kenzō Tange

Kenzō Tange was born in Osaka Prefecture on 4 September 1913 and grew up in Imabari, on the island of Shikoku. It was the work of Le Corbusier that stirred his imagination as an architect. A graduate of Tokyo Imperial University in 1938, he joined the office of Kunio Maekawa, a pupil of Le Corbusier. From 1946 to 1974 he taught at the University of Tokyo and led the Tange Laboratory, which produced Takashi Asada, Sachio Ōtani, Fumihiko Maki, Arata Isozaki, Kishō Kurokawa and Yoshio Taniguchi.

In 1949 he won the competition for the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum. The museum, opened in 1955, is a reinforced-concrete building lifted on pilotis; in 2006 it was among the first postwar buildings designated an Important Cultural Property. Tange handled concrete on a monumental scale throughout the 1950s. At the Kagawa Prefectural Government Office (1958) he expressed traditional Japanese architecture in reinforced concrete and opened the ground floor to residents. Kenneth Frampton sees there a frame of concrete cast in boarded formwork whose proportions and rhythm recall Japanese timber framing.

In 1961 he founded Kenzo Tange and URTEC, a team of architects, engineers, planners and economists. For the 1964 Olympic Games he produced the Yoyogi gymnasia, steel-cable structures hung from concrete pylons, where he achieved the world's largest cable-suspended roof of the time. St. Mary's Cathedral in Tokyo, a shell structure, was completed the same year. Before designing it he had visited several Gothic cathedrals and wished to create new spaces by modern technology. He put forward the Plan for Tokyo 1960 and drew up the master plan for the Osaka World Exposition of 1970.

In the 1970s heavy concrete gave way to towers clad in black glass, such as the Sōgetsu Kaikan in Tokyo (1977). His office also built abroad: the OUB Centre and UOB Plaza in Singapore and the extension of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. In 1986 Tange won the competition for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government headquarters, completed in 1991. The Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall, designed by his office and opened in 2002, descends underground to a circular hall: a central monument marks the time of the explosion and receives water for the victims who died seeking it.

Honoured with the Order of Culture in 1980, the Pritzker Prize in 1987 and the Praemium Imperiale in 1993, Tange saw tradition as a catalyst: it may take part in a creation but can no longer create by itself. He died in Tokyo on 22 March 2005.