Kenzo Tange: public buildings and urban plans

After graduating in 1938, Tange worked in Kunio Maekawa’s office before returning to the University of Tokyo for research and teaching. His early work included an unbuilt 1942 competition proposal for a wartime national memorial. His team won the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park competition in 1949; the museum building was completed in 1955. Raised construction and open space allow a memorial axis to connect the museum, cenotaph and Atomic Bomb Dome.

Yoyogi’s facilities for the 1964 Olympics use suspended roofs to create large open interiors. Tange led architectural design, Yoshikatsu Tsuboi structural design and Uichi Inoue building services. The project brought together roof engineering, spectator circulation and systems for the indoor environment. In the First Gymnasium, two main cables span between two principal columns, carrying the suspended roof and continuing down to ground anchors. The Second Gymnasium uses a single principal column and spiralling suspension pipes. Their curved silhouettes thus arise from different structural arrangements.

The 1958 Kagawa Prefectural Government Office uses exposed concrete beams whose proportions recall Japanese timber construction. The material belongs to modern construction, while the treatment of its structural members draws on historical architecture. Such connections between modernism and Japanese building traditions recur in Tange’s work.

A Plan for Tokyo 1960, announced in 1961, proposed an urban axis and an expandable structure; the complete scheme was never built. Tange also worked on reconstruction planning for Skopje, Bologna’s Fiera district centre (1975–1982) and the 1970 Osaka Expo. These projects extended his practice from individual buildings to city districts and large public sites.

Public buildings and work abroad

Tokyo’s new Metropolitan Government buildings, completed in 1991, were among Tange’s later large public projects. His university research and design offices supported a practice extending from individual buildings to urban plans, with architects and engineers collaborating across these different scales.

The practice and its collaborators

His working institutions changed with the scale of practice: URTEC was founded in 1961, followed by Kenzo Tange and URTEC in 1974. The national architectural archive preserves design, construction and services drawings as well as overseas projects. These records reveal the coordinated work behind buildings commonly identified with a single architect.