Kenzō Tange

1913–2005 · Japanese · 19 buildings on the wall

Kenzō Tange (1913–2005) was a Japanese architect and urban planner who joined traditional Japanese building to modernism and became one of the first Japanese architects known around the world. Inspired early by Le Corbusier, he later mentored and championed the Metabolist movement, and he won the Royal Gold Medal in 1965 and the Pritzker Prize in 1987.

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His winning design for the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park raised the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (1955) off the ground on a frame and set it on an axis running through the park. The Kagawa Prefectural Government Office (1958) has been likened to the Daibutsu style of Nara's Tōdai-ji temple, with thin columns that leave room for glass. For the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the first held in Asia, the Yoyogi National Gymnasium hangs its roof skin from two masts. St. Mary's Cathedral in Tokyo (1964) rises from a cross-shaped plan as eight curved shells clad in stainless steel, opening into a cross of light. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (1991) sets two towers over a civic plaza. Kenzō Tange's projects are studied for structure, city planning and the meeting of Japanese tradition and modernism.

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