For the quarter century following World War II, Kenzo Tange was among the world’s leading architects; his work defined post-war modernism in Japan. Tange’s promising beginning, after graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1938 and then working for Kunio Maekawa for four years, was enhanced by the almost complete disappearance of architectural practice during the latter days of the war. This absence allowed him to return to the University of Tokyo in 1946, and he remained there as a student and member of the faculty until 1974.
In his spectacular debut, winning first place in the Far East Greater Coprosperity Sphere Competition of 1942, Tange engaged the nationalist spirit of the time, gaining recognition through the controversy that emerged. His proposal for a monument to Japan’s fallen soldiers, to be built on a long axis beginning at the foot of Mount Fuji, was influenced by Japan’s temple precincts. By blending Japanese traditions with European modernism, Tange took a very different position than others of his generation who wholeheartedly embraced an international style.
For many years Tange’s work was unabashedly regionalist. Through 1960 Tange defined a new Japan, infused with tradition and optimistically reflecting the utopian hopes of the era. He embraced the symbols Japan’s citizens held dear but overlaid them with an enthusiasm for new technologies. This approach is seen in some of his best built works: his first, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Museum (1955), was inspired by the sukiya character of buildings such as Katsura Imperial Villa; the surface treatments of the facades at both Kagawa Prefectural Offices (1959) and Kurashiki City Hall (1960) drew on Japan’s timber traditions, but in concrete used at a monumental scale; and in the later Olympic Stadia (1964, Tokyo), Tange’s roofs were structurally remarkable but comfortingly close to the form of Japan’s traditional farmhouses. Critics, however, tended to disparage buildings with ties to tradition, favoring more sculptural efforts, such as the Children’s Library (1953) at Hiroshima. Tange began to treat traditional nuances as a failing, but today it is those buildings that were initially dismissed by critics that better define his reputation. Yet while Tange’s early sculptural works were clumsy, they served as the basis for several extraordinary buildings from the 1960s, including not only the Olympic Stadia but also St. Mary’s Cathedral (1964, Tokyo) and the Memorial to Fallen Soldiers (1966).
From the beginning Tange also emphasized the urban and regional scale, using axiality as an ordering device. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Tange drew on an emerging political will, reflecting the introduction of democratic ideals through his “mass-human” spaces dedicated to collective activities. Many of his designs for government institutions sandwiched offices between publicly accessible roof terraces (the Kagawa Prefectural Hall had a popular cocktail bar on its rooftop) and an open ground plane slipped through first-floor pilotis.
In 1961 Tange founded URTEC, Urbanists and Architects Team, inspired by Gropius’s The Architects’ Collaborative. His designs from the 1960s tended toward structuralism. Complexes were organized into a three-dimensional system made up of service cores, circulation paths, and bridgelike blocks or figural units dedicated to programmatic needs, with opportunities for future additions. The most powerful of these is a 1961 plan for Tokyo Bay, developed with students at the University of Tokyo. Participants in this design—among them Fumihiko Maki, Arata Isozaki, Kiyonori Kikutake, and Kisho Kurokawa—went on to shape Japan’s most exciting architectural movement, Metabolism. Although none of Tange’s urban plans were executed, two notable buildings were completed using similar principles: the Yamanashi Press and Broadcasting Center (1966) and the Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Center (1970) in Tokyo. The final Metabolist undertaking was Expo ‘70 in Osaka, the first full-scale demonstration of a Metabolist city. The public received the project more as an entertainment than as a rare opportunity to recognize the value of a comprehensive urban proposal, and the movement collapsed under its failure to be understood.
At roughly the same time, community resistance scrapped Tange’s proposal for Yerba Buena (1969) in San Francisco, which was also based on structuralist principles. Suddenly, enormous size was no longer a merit: The architect whose works had deftly represented the conflicts and ideals of Japan’s postwar boom found himself out of step. At first Tange found opportunities to work in Europe, but as the West and Japan began to address the ecological fallout of megaprojects, demand for Tange’s work shifted to Arab nations and, in the early 1980s, Southeast Asia. At one point 70 to 80 percent of the firm’s work came from abroad. His projects from this period often remained unbuilt, and those that were completed took an average of ten years from basic design through execution, making it difficult for Tange to respond to innovations in construction technologies. Furthermore, he was less able to develop a language that reflected the hopes of these unfamiliar cultures, and buildings from this period seem awkwardly fitted to their time and place.
Tange’s architecture continued to draw on many earlier themes. He remained concerned with large-scale complexes organized in response to clear principles. In his interiors he often developed a polished monumentality, especially notable in the Akasaka Prince Hotel (1982). His architecture from this period is generally less appreciated, though, as strategies from his earlier work became formulaic. In the final years of his career, however, Tange began again to build symbolically important works in his native country, especially the New Tokyo City Hall (1991) and the United Nations University Building (1992). These buildings, while not as vigorous as works from his youth, retain a monumentality and sense of detail that are clearly related to his earlier masterpieces. Tange also found a way, in the end, to create a large-scale order in the city of Tokyo— not through his revisions to the Tokyo Bay Plan (1986) but in his design of two of Tokyo’s tallest buildings. The New Tokyo City Hall and the nearby Tokyo Park Tower can be seen from the megalopolis’s farthest suburbs and establish an order in the region that Tange once reserved for Mount Fuji.
DANA BUNTROCK
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3 (P-Z). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
