Kenzo Tange

Cathedral of Santa Maria de Tokyo and bell tower.

Kenzō Tange (丹下健三, Tange Kenzō^?) (Sakai, September 4, 1913 - Tokyo, March 22, 2005) was a Japanese architect and urban planner. He was linked to the Modern and Metabolist movements. He received the Pritzker Prize in 1987.

Among his most outstanding works there are several in Tokyo, such as the City Hall, the Olympic Stadium, the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, the Cathedral of Santa Maria or the Shinjuku Park and Mode Gakuen Coccoon towers. In Shanghai he made the headquarters of the Bank of Shanghai, in Hiroshima the Peace Memorial Museum and in Singapore One Raffles Place. Outside of Asia, his best-known work is the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He was also the leading architect in the reconstruction of the city of Skopje, the current capital of North Macedonia, after it was destroyed by a strong earthquake in 1963. He also designed the Japanese embassy in Mexico City together with Pedro Ramírez Vázquez.

Biography

She was born in Sakai, but spent most of her childhood in her father's hometown of Imabari in Japan's Ehime Prefecture. As a teenager he had not thought of being an architect, but he had the opportunity to learn about the work of Le Corbusier, which impressed him and led him to the determination to be an architect. He studied at the University of Tokyo Faculty of Architecture. His doctoral thesis dealt with the structuring of spaces in large cities, considering the displacements that occur between places of work and places of residence.

In 1946 he became an adjunct professor at the same university and organized the so-called Tange Laboratory (タンゴ•ラボラトリ), where he and his students designed projects. Among his students were architects who would later also be famous, such as Arata Isozaki. At this time Tange was commissioned to lead the rebuilding of Hiroshima. He designed the Park and the Peace Center, which are symbols of the human aspiration for peace. The Peace Center (1949) has great modernist influence. Its construction, made of exposed reinforced concrete, and its monumental size, supported on pillars, evoke the principles proposed by Le Corbusier. To its sides are located two smaller buildings, corresponding to the Library and the conference center.

In 1967, when his prestige had already transcended the borders of Japan, Tange was commissioned to design the Bologna fairgrounds in Italy and a new city with a capacity for 60,000 inhabitants in Sicily. Although he has done works in various places around the world, most of them are in his native Japan, especially Tokyo.

To design Tokyo's new cathedral, Tange visited numerous medieval and Gothic cathedrals in Europe. Seeing its grandeur pointing to the sky and its mystical spaces, Tange himself says, he envisioned the new cathedral with large spaces designed in the modern style. One of Tange's great achievements is the set of buildings and open spaces around the new Tokyo City Hall. It consists of two towers, a square and a park. The 1960 Plan for Tokyo caught the attention of the architectural community around the world for its innovative concept directing the growth of the city toward the bay, using bridges, artificial islands, and floating parking lots.

Tange was visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston, United States), and gave seminars at Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, and Washington Universities, among others, as well as at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He won the Pritzker Prize in 1987, the most prestigious international award for architecture.

Tange's projects reflect his conviction that architecture should have something that touches people's hearts. Even so, the shapes, spaces and appearance must respond to a logic. Tange believed that the design of our time must combine technology and humanity. Tradition may be present in some way in the creation of a new project, but it is no longer visible in the finished work.

Representative works

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Fuji Television building in Odaiba.

• Olivetti headquarters in Japan (Tokio, Japan)
• Set of the new Town Hall (Tokio)
• Cultural Centre (Nichinan, Japan)
• Tokyo Expansion, 1960 Plan (Tokyo, Japan)
• Radio and Press Centre (Kofu, Japan)
• Cathedral of Santa Maria (Tokio, Japan)
• Tower of the Overseas Union Bank (Singapore)
• Olympic Stadium (Tokyo, Japan)
• Coupled housing (Ichinomiya, Japan)

• Kurashiki City Council (Kurashiki, Japan)
• Telecommunications Centre (Singapore)
• Sogetsu Art Centre (Tokio, Japan)
• Instituto Tecnológico Nanyang (Singapore)
• Hotel Akasaka Prince (Tokyo, Japan)
• Hyogo Prefectural History Museum (Kobe, Japan)
• Expansion of the Museum of Art (Minnapolis, United States)
• Monumental Peace Set (Hiroshima, Japan)
• Tohin School (Tokio, Japan)
• Art Museum (Yokohama, Japan)
• United Nations University headquarters (Tokyo, Japan)
• Fairground (Bologna, Italy)
• New city in Catania, Italy
• Embassy of Japan in Mexico (Mexico City, Mexico)
• Embassy of Japan in Spain (Madrid, Spain)