Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Kenzo Tange, the Japanese architect who converted the core of a barren Hiroshima into a tranquil peace park in the 1940’s and 50’s, and designed Tokyo’s starkly modernist St. Mary’s Cathedral in 1964 - where his funeral is to be held - died yesterday at his home in Tokyo. He was 91.

The cause was heart failure, The Associate Press reported, citing a spokesman for Mr. Tange’s architectural firm.

Although he designed buildings throughout the world, he was perhaps best known for his work in Japan, including the massive New Tokyo City Hall (1991), housing 13,000 bureaucrats; the Fuji television building (1996), two towers linked by earthquake-proof pedestrian bridges; and two sports arenas for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.

Mr. Tange was an admirer of both Le Corbusier and traditional Japanese architecture, and his early work synthesized the two. His Olympic arenas, whose swooping suspended roofs are often described as among the most beautiful structures of the 20th century, also evoke the simplicity of archaic temple forms.

In awarding Mr. Tange the Pritzker Prize - architecture’s highest honor - in 1987, an international jury acknowledged this duality. “Tange arrives at shapes that lift our hearts,” the citation said, “because they seem to emerge from some ancient and dimly remembered past and yet are breathtakingly of today.”

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