Udo Kultermann [Editor]: KENZO TANGE 1946 – 1969 [Architecture and Urban Design]. New York: Praeger Publishing, Inc., 1970. First English language edition. Text in English, German and French. Quarto. Orange cloth decorated in black. Black endpapers. Publishers slipcase. 304 pp. Fully illustrated with black and white photographs and a few color site plans. Orange cloth lightly soiled and spine titles slightly flaked. Haalf title page neatly creased. Glossy decorated paper covered slipcase with expected wear to edges, including a bumped lower corner and dust spotted upper edge. A very good or better copy in a very good example of the Publishers slipcase.
10.75 x 11.25-inch hardcover book with 304 pages fully illustrated with black and white plans, drawings, and photographs and a few color site plans. Text by Kenzo Tange and edited by Udo Kultermann.
Includes the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Hiroshima; (Former) Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, Yūrakuchō; Kagawa Prefectural Government Building the east offices, Takamatsu, Kagawa; Kurashiki City Hall, Kurashiki, Okayama; St. Mary's Cathedral (Tokyo Cathedral), Tokyo (1964); The Tokyo Plan – 1960; Osaka Expo; the redevelopment of Skopje; Yamanashi Broadcasting and Press Centre (1966); the 1970 Exposition; and more.
For Reyner Banham, Tange was a prime exemplar of the use of Brutalist architecture. His use of Béton brut concrete finishes in a raw and undecorated way combined with his civic projects such as the redevelopment of Tokyo Bay made him a great influence on British architects during the 1960s. Brutalist architecture has been criticised for being soulless and for promoting the exclusive use of a material that is poor at withstanding long exposures to natural weather.
Tadao Ando, one of Japan's greatest living architects, likes to tell the story of the stray dog, a stately akita, that wandered into his studio in Osaka some 20 years ago, and decided to stay. "First, I thought I would call her Kenzo Tange; but then I realised I couldn't kick Kenzo Tange around. So I called her Le Corbusier instead."
Kenzō Tange (1913 – 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. His career spanned the entire second half of the twentieth century, producing numerous distinctive buildings in Tokyo, other Japanese cities and cities around the world, as well as ambitious physical plans for Tokyo and its environs. Tange was also an influential patron of the Metabolist movement. 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), a reference to the architectural movement known as Dutch Structuralism.
Influenced from an early age by the Swiss modernist, Le Corbusier, Tange gained international recognition in 1949 when he won the competition for the design of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. He was a member of CIAM (Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) in the 1950s. He did not join the group of younger CIAM architects known as Team X, though his 1960 Tokyo Bay plan was influential for Team 10 in the 1960s, as well as the group that became Metabolism.
In 1946, Tange became an assistant professor at the university and opened Tange Laboratory. In 1963, he was promoted to professor of the Department of Urban Engineering. His students included Sachio Otani, Kisho Kurokawa, Arata Isozaki, Hajime Yatsuka and Fumihiko Maki.
Tange's interest in urban studies put him in a good position to handle post war reconstruction. In the summer of 1946 he was invited by the War Damage Rehabilitation Board to put forward a proposal for certain war damaged cities. He submitted plans for Hiroshima and Maebashi. His design for an airport in Kanon, Hiroshima was accepted and built, but a seaside park in Ujina was not.
The Hiroshima authorities took advice about the city's reconstruction from foreign consultants, and in 1947 Tam Deling, an American park planner, suggested they build a Peace Memorial and preserve buildings situated near ground zero, that point directly below the explosion of the atomic bomb. In 1949 the authorities enacted the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Reconstruction Act, which gave the city access to special grant aid, and in August 1949, an international competition was announced for the design of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.
Tange's first placing in the design competition for the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park gained him recognition from Kunio Maekawa. The elder architect invited Tange to attend the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Founded in 1928, this organization of planners and architects had initially promoted architecture in economic and social context, but at its fourth meeting in 1933 (under the direction of Le Corbusier) it debated the notion of the "Functional City". This led to a series of proposals on urban planning known as "The Athens Charter". By the 1951 CIAM meeting that was held in Hoddesdon, England, to which Tange was invited, the Athens Charter came under debate by younger members of the group (including Tange) who found the Charter too vague in relation to city expansion. The "Athens Charter" promoted the idea that a city gains character from its continual changes over many years; this notion was written before the advent of mass bombings and the Second World War and therefore held little meaning for Tange who had evidenced the destruction of Hiroshima. The discussions at Hoddesdon sowed discontent within CIAM that eventually contributed to its breakup after their Dubrovnik meeting in 1956; the younger members of CIAM formed a splinter group known as Team X, which Tange later joined. Tange presented various designs to Team X in their meetings. At a 1959 meeting in Otterlo, Holland, one of his presentations included an unrealised project by Kiyonori Kikutake; this project became the basis of the Metabolist Movement.
The modular expansion of Tange's Metabolist visions had some influence on Archigram with their plug-in mega structures.The Metabolist movement gave momentum to Kikutake's career. Although his Marine City proposals (submitted by Tange at CIAM) were not realised, his Miyakonojo City Hall (1966) was a more Metabolist example of Tange's own Nichinan Cultural Centre (1962). Although the Osaka Expo had marked a decline in the Metabolist movement, it resulted in a "handing over" of the reigns to a younger generation of architects such as Kazuo Shinohara and Arata Isozaki.
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