| Posted on April 22nd, 2008 at 9:07 am by francesco |
The leading and World Famous Architects in Japan for a quarter-century after the Second World War. Tange studied at the University of Tokyo, graduating in 1938, and worked for Kunio Maekawa (1938-41) before returning to his alma mater to study city planning in the graduate school (1942-5). He became assistant professor of architecture in 1946 and received a D.Eng. in 1959. In 1961 he became the principal of Kenzo Tange + Urtec (now called Kenzo Tange Associates). He was professor of urban engineering at the University of Tokyo from 1963 to 1974, when he became a professor emeritus. A second- generation Modern Movement architect, Tange attempted in the first half of his career to meld Modernism — particularly the Modernism of Le Corbusier - with traditional architectural forms, producing some of the most striking works of Twentieth Century Japanese architecture. In the late 1960s he repudiated his earlier regionalism and became an exponent of an abstract internationalist style, which he has displayed in numerous projects, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia. He has been consistent, however, in his concern for a clear structural order, and his formal virtuosity has rarely been questioned. As an urbanist, he attempted to give physical coherence to the city by the introduction of so-called “megastructures”, huge structures accommodating services and transportation, and he was closely associated with (but never a member of) the Metabolist movement, which adopted a similar approach. He was also influential as the teacher of many leading third- generation Japanese architects, including Arata Isozaki, Kisho Kurokawa, and Fumihiko Maki. He has received the gold medals of the RIBA (1965), the AIA (1966) and the French Academy of Architecture (1973) and the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1987).
