Art: New Japanese Architect

Japan has one of the world’s most admired architectural traditions, one that has influenced Western artists and architects from the mid-19th century to the present. But at home Japanese architects have long found themselves faced with a dilemma: how to be modern and still remain Japanese. When the modern movement was brought back from Europe by early Japanese students of Germany’s Bauhaus and France’s Le Corbusier (see below), the results were often merely derivative cubist modern.

Ironically, what paved the way for Japan’s present architectural rebirth was defeat in World War II. The B-29s flattened Japanese cities, and the U.S. occupation knocked into limbo the oppressive remnants of autocracy and feudalism that had saddled Japan for centuries. And up from the ashes rose a new Japanese architecture that is attempting to blend modern technology with traditional Japanese needs and feeling for structure. Best of this new generation intent on making “something new of tradition” is Kenzo Tange, 46, who stands today at the crossroads where Japanese tradition and contemporary architecture meet.

Tomb for Hiroshima. Tange decided in his teens to become an architect after he had seen pictures of Le Corbusier’s rejected plan for the League of Nations. He attended Tokyo’s Imperial University, later worked with Architect Kunio Maekawa, a former Le Corbusier pupil. Tange’s big chance came after the war, when in 1949 he won the national competition to build the Hiroshima Peace Center on the site where the first A-bomb was dropped. His solution for the museum, library and auditorium was typically Corbusian: a series of reinforced concrete structures set on stilts. But for the memorial itself Tange felt the need of something more evocative of Japan’s past, decided on a massive concrete vault derived from the ancient Haniwa houses found in the burial mounds of early Japanese emperors. Under the shell is a simple stone block, beneath which the names of A-bomb victims are placed.

Like architects the world over, Tange also eyed with excitement the new world of space-spanning shells. For Ehime’s convention hall, he tried a low, curving shell set with 133 ceiling lights (see color); for Shizuoka, he designed a hyperbolic paraboloid auditorium that holds an audience of 5,000. His Tokyo City Hall this year received the first International Grand Prix awarded by France’s Architecture d’Aujourd’hui.

Tea on the Roof. With success, Tange found himself growing restless with the international modern style he had inherited from the West, increasingly probed into Japan’s deep architectural past. There he found heavy beams and posts (necessary in an earthquake-plagued country), a love of structural expression, and at the most primitive level, ancient pit houses with thatched roofs that heavily emphasize weight and volume (as opposed to the elegantly simple floating structures with shoji screens familiar to most Westerners).

The structure that comes closest to satisfying Tange’s new ideal is his Kagawa Prefectural Office, completed last year. With its massive exposed beams rising in tiers, ceramic Zen symbols emblazoned on its walls, and a rock garden in the tradition of the Ryoanji Temple, it strikes an unmistakably Japanese note in the modern idiom of reinforced concrete. As well as recalling the past, Tange believes his building must also “make an image of our new social structure.” For Tange this means the new democracy in which citizens are now invited to become part of the government. To welcome them, he has left the garden open for concerts, set benches under the raised stilts, put promenades and a tearoom on the roof to emphasize “this penetration of government by the citizens.”

Impressed by his sudden emergence into the limelight, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology invited him this fall to lecture as a guest professor. In Cambridge last week, Tange’s thoughts were still in Japan; he was worried that too many traces of the past may remain in his work: “Tradition,” he says, “must be like a catalyst that disappears once its task is done.”