Liu Lemon
Kenzo Tange: Imagining Postwar Japan, by Toyokawa Saihide, translated by Liu Ming, produced by Nova Press in June 2021
What is vocation? Tang Yangliang's annotation to Xunzi Yun: "Do not become for it, do not seek to get it, four hours of action, a hundred things are born, and the office of heaven is like this." Max Weber's discourse of "politics as a cause" and "academic career" have a similar context. If we divide architects into two categories – one is the "professional" who designs houses for a living, and the other is the architect who wants to change people's lives, the connotation of the latter is obviously closer to "vocation". In this sense, Kenzo Tange is an ideal architect who was born out of nowhere: because of his dedication to this vocation, he not only greatly broadened the scope of traditional architectural design, rewriting the landscape of Japanese and even world cities, but also the actions and lifestyles of people, as the main body of cities and buildings, were profoundly changed by the redefinition of spatial relations.
Kenzo Tange (1913-2005)
Kenzo Tange's architectural design began during the war and was completed after the war. During Hiroshima's old high school years, he stumbled upon a catalogue by le Corbusier, a master of modern architecture, and was so shocked that he vowed to become an architect and enter the Department of Architecture at Tokyo Imperial University. In 1938, after graduating from UTokyo University, Although Tange entered the design office of Kobusier's disciple and the top japanese architect Maekawa Kunio before the war, and also worked on the design of projects such as the Kishi Memorial Gymnasium, in the increasingly tightening atmosphere of the times, nationalism was rampant, and project orders fell sharply, making him feel that his career prospects were uncertain. "I can't do what I want to do anyway, maybe it's a good opportunity to go back to the furnace", simply resigned and returned to Dongda. During his graduate school years, he studied national housing, participated in a design competition sponsored by the Architectural Society of Japan for three consecutive years, and won the first prize three times. Although none of the submitted designs were implemented, Tange became a campus celebrity. But at that time, his academic interests actually went beyond the design of specific buildings, and the person who was thinking about it was urban design.
In 1946, Tange graduated from graduate school and became an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at Tokyo Imperial University, and founded his own research laboratory (Tange Research Laboratory, or "Danken"). From then on, less than three decades after he retired from Todai in 1974, a large number of outstanding architects and elite bureaucrats emerged from the research room transformed from the sculpture studio, including many masters who won the Pritzker Prize and the Architectural Society of Japan Award. The phenomenon of "geniuses appearing in groups" was revived in the Tange Schule school and became a miracle in the history of architecture and culture.
Tange in UTokyo "Danken"
There is no profession that relies more on the fortunes of the times and the fortunes of nations than architects. No one could have imagined that the silent efforts of young architects in wartime had become the starting point of their careers. In the early post-war period, the people's livelihood was exhausted and needed to be rebuilt, and The first project of Danken was the Hiroshima Urban Revitalization Program commissioned by the War Disaster Rehabilitation Institute (the predecessor of the construction province). For Tange, Hiroshima was a city with a special complex: he spent high school in that ancient city; in August 1945, on a train on the way to the funeral of his father, he heard that Hiroshima had dropped a "new bomb" (atomic bomb). When she returned to her hometown in Imabari City, Ehime Prefecture, her home had been destroyed by incendiary bombs, and her mother followed her father.
The Hiroshima Urban Revitalization Plan lasted for 156 years. During this time, Tange also participated in the design of a series of important projects, such as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park (1955), the (former) Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office (1957), the Kagawa Prefectural Government Office (1958), and the Imabari City Hall (1958). Among them, in 1949, in the open design competition of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the Danken Project won the first prize. This comprehensive design scheme consisting of the Atomic Bomb Memorial Museum, the Peace Hall and the Memorial Monument is still an urban design, and its positioning is equivalent to the core of the Hiroshima Urban Revitalization Plan that Danken is working hard to promote. In the plan, Danxia's Fa corbusier's pillar structure (Pilotis) is an overhead building body, opening up the field of vision, and the building is integrated with the square. In the design of the column, Tange was inspired by the structure and proportions of the traditional Japanese building Katsuragi Palace, which not only satisfies the support of mechanics, but also loses the beautiful and flowing wind, and when you look closely at the column, the concrete surface shows the pattern of trees, which can be described as unique. In the macroscopic view, the center of the building falls on the north-south axis perpendicular to the city's main road, Heping Avenue, and is symmetrical left and right. Through the saddle-shaped memorial, you can see the dome of the remains of the building at the site of the nuclear explosion at the southernmost point of the axis.
As a monumental complex, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park perfectly fulfilled Tange's original intention that the completed facility would become a "factory for creating peace", becoming one of the earliest classics in the history of Japanese post-war architecture. For Tanxia, although it is the original finished product, almost "debut", it is indeed a perfect start. Not only is it a single building, as an urban design operation, the starting point is so high that future generations of architects are stunned, and Danxia has become the most important architect in China and has also become famous internationally. Not only that, the various tangible and intangible methods and volt lines condensed in this work were mostly solidified into the design specifications of the Tange School in the future, and even became the industry standard of the Japanese construction industry, while rewriting the appearance of the city, the influence also overflowed the national borders: such as the colonnade structure, such as the baseline, such as the Tange modulus, and so on.
Objectively speaking, after the rapid Westernization enlightenment of the Meiji era and the silent westernization movement of the Taisho era, as early as before the war, the Japanese construction industry had completed the homework of catching up with and surpassing the West, and the overall standard was no less than that of Europe and the United States. This can also be seen in the architectural remnants of the Meiji and Taisho periods that can be seen everywhere in Japanese metropolises today - including the Western-style buildings designed by Japanese architects, as well as the "imperial crown style" public buildings left over from the Imperial Revival Plan after the Great Kanto Earthquake, which are both aesthetic and functional. However, in Tanshita's view, the japanese eclectic architecture of Japan and the pure modern architecture of the West before the war actually have their own limitations and are difficult to get into. The reason for this is not necessarily the problem of the specific building itself, but some of it is caused by Tange's own romantic "cleanliness".
There is a famous quote in Tenshira that sounds provocative: "Beauty is functional." According to the architectural historian Toyokawa Saihide, this statement has two meanings: one is that Tange tries to clarify the boundary with the "beauty plastic surgery" school, no matter how bad the reality is, but as long as it is covered with gorgeous packaging, it can turn ugly into beauty; at the same time, it is also very different from the pure "functionalist" school of thought. Functionalists believe that as long as the owner's requirements are carefully and steadily satisfied, redundant elements will automatically peel off. But Tange advocated, "Only the chosen can create beauty." In other words, beauty is dynamic, not passive. As an incorrigible romanticist, he even felt that "once the building is built, it will in turn promote the development of reality, and even transform it to make it more abundant" and "I believe in the power of architecture". For example, after the completion of the old Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office, the flow of people and vehicles was diverted through the structure of the Pedestrian Deck. When people come out of the station, they can go straight through the colonnade hall of the infinity wall, and then take the elevator in the core tube area of the building to go to the floor they want to go to - changing the displacement in a parallel direction to a vertical movement. Nowadays, this way of traveling and consuming with the station building group as the physical center has long become commonplace, but if you trace back to the roots, it is actually the beautiful life created by architecture.
Although Tange himself has no experience in studying abroad, he has systematically inspected Western architecture because of his early commitment to international academic exchanges and overseas engineering design. When he looked at the urban restoration map of the Greek and Roman eras, he noticed: "There are almost all squares in the center of the city, which were called open-air markets in Greek times and assembly halls in Roman times, in short, they are located in the core area, centered on it, and the city extends outward in an orderly manner. "In traditional Japanese architecture, the shrine Buddhist pavilion has a main hall, a five-storied pagoda and a cloister, and in ordinary houses, there are bedrooms, living quarters and eaves corridors, which not only reflect the functional distinction between private and public, but also interconnected. Can't this kind of harmonious and natural spatial order be promoted in urban planning? This is a long-lingering problem in Tange's heart. At this point, the architect has also touched on the core of modern architecture and urban design, that is, in the post-war democratic society, the question of "what is public architecture", or "what is democratic architecture". This is also one of the reasons why Tange does not like the traditional "imperial crown style". It can be said that from early works such as the Kagawa Prefectural Government Hall to later works such as the new Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office, Tange has been unremittingly exploring and giving many effective solutions, from the elevated colonnade hall to the theme square in front of the building.
In addition, just as Tanshita has always paid attention to the function of "gong" in traditional architecture, how to expand into the public space of large-scale modern buildings and even the democracy square of the city, he also tried to deliberately introduce certain elements in the reinforced concrete structure to return the nourishment of Japanese architectural beauty, while improving the function, paying tribute to tradition. If you carefully investigate, it is not difficult to find the influence of famous temples such as the Phoenix Hall, the Thirty-three Halls, the Dragon An Temple, and the Kiyomizu Temple from his design.
Dange is sharp-minded, extremely forward-looking, very good at capturing the situation of the times, summarizing the general trend of economic and social development, and then refining it into an ideological "dry goods" with guiding significance for urban planning and architectural design. When he conceived of Japan's future, he "not only appealed to the sensibility of artists, but also worked as a scientist", and was the first Japanese architect to devote himself to "urban analysis". In 1959, while a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, he wrote a letter instructing his research colleagues to investigate the quantitative indicators related to Tokyo from seven aspects—in fact, the big data model at that time. It was on the basis of a comprehensive grasp of the reality of the process of urbanization that Tange announced the groundbreaking comprehensive development concept of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, "Tokyo Planning 1960": that is, starting from the center of Tokyo, a line (Civic Axis) is drawn to Kisarazu in Chiba Prefecture. In the waters of Tokyo Bay, which runs through the axis, there are eight blocks. Different neighborhoods are connected by elevated maritime highways. Despite constraints, the vision of a future metropolis on the sea was not realized, but it had a direct impact on the development of the Tokyo Bay coast area later, especially after entering the 21st century. What's even more amazing is that the main venue of the 32nd Olympic Games, which was scheduled to take place in July 2020 and was postponed due to the global outbreak of the new crown virus, is located at the beginning of the urban axis originally delineated by Danxia.
In the 1960s, the construction industry was affected by japan's high economic growth and accelerated urbanization, abolishing building height restrictions and developing seismic and flexible structural construction methods. Since then, Tange has begun to pay attention to and think about the growth of the city - what kind of ecology should a continuously growing city have? In 1961, the Kensan Urban and Architectural Design Institute was established, and in 1963, the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Tokyo established the Department of Urban Engineering, and Tange became a professor. Hideo Yoshida, president of Dentsu Corporation, who was later regarded as the "standard-bearer of the information society", commissioned him to design the Dentsu Headquarters Building, and as an opportunity, Tange upgraded the concepts of "building that can communicate in three dimensions" and "building that can grow" to the urban level, and the Dentsu project actually became part of the urban planning project, Tsukiji redevelopment.
After the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Tange proposed a cross-economic urbanization concept of the Tokaido Metropolitan Belt (Megalopolis). He saw the inevitability of population concentration in the process of economic development to the metropolis, so he predicted that with the emergence of the Shinkansen and the expressway, "the economic circle beyond the pre-war circle of the capital circle, the Zhongjing circle, and the Kansai circle will soon occur, and the national territory will be organically integrated." The key to turning a city with a population of tens of millions into an organic life lies in communication - "communication is the concrete of society" Today, half a century later, thanks to a well-developed transportation/communication network and a sound infrastructure, the physical boundaries of the Japanese metropolitan area have been almost eliminated, replaced by more open social organizations, and the mobility of people has increased sharply.
Among the masters of modern architecture, few are as persistently obsessed with the thinking of "space and symbolism" as Tange. Therefore, whether it is a single commercial building, a big Mac public construction, or even an urban planning project, his design works implement the pursuit of a certain "symbolism". Depending on the history, culture, and use and attributes of the area in which the building is located, the building is given meaning in one way or another, but no part is meaningless. It can be said that they are monumental works to a considerable extent: such as the Main Olympic Venue, the Yoyogi Stadium and the Tokyo Cathedral designed in the same year (1964), such as the Yamanashi Bunka Kaikan (1966), the Osaka World Expo Celebration Plaza (1970), such as Kuwait International Airport (1979), the Singapore OUB Building (1986), such as the Yokohama Art Museum (1989), the Tokyo Metropolitan New Hall Building (1991) and the United Nations University (1992), and so on. This is why Kenzo Tange is regarded as the greatest modern architect after Le Corbusier, and also constitutes the distinction between him and postmodern architecture.
Aerial view of Tokyo's Yoyogi Gymnasium (courtesy of Yomiuri Shimbun)
The second person on the left is Tange, Hiroji Kamiya, and Taro Okamoto, at the construction site of the Yoyogi Gymnasium in Tokyo
In the 1970s, after the first "oil crisis", the Japanese economy was violently shaken, and there was no domestic commission, and The influence of Tenshita "crossed the border" in a big way. Today, including China's northern, upper and deeper provinces, the works of Japanese architects have long been spread throughout the metropolises of the world, and the "Japanese Legion" has become a prominent presence in the international architectural community. But if you go back, Kenzo Tange was recognized by the Japanese architectural community as a "big predecessor of the international school", and the early "Japanese Legion" was all an architect of the Danken department. Before the "Made in Japan" white goods and automobiles, in the early post-war period, a famous brand that Japan contributed to the international community was "KENZO TANGE", a Tange version of skyscrapers and urban design. Isozaki Shin, another architect from Danyan, recalled that when his colleagues in Europe and the United States heard that he was a member of Danyan, "My situation will be immediately different." The other person immediately asked 'How is Mr. Tange, what project he has been doing recently', and his eyes were full of curiosity." When The boys in the class, the daughter of former Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, were in high school in Pennsylvania in the 1960s, the boys in her class said to her, "The only Japanese people I know but you are Hirohito and Tange."
Tange and the disciples of "Danken", from left to right: Tange, Takashi Asada, Masaichi Kawai, and Yukio Otani, photographed at the University of Tokyo
Tange is a pure architect. According to his son-in-law, Tange Kentaka, who was also an architect, and his disciples recalled that In life, Tange was a "boring" person—no interest, or architecture was his only interest. He wasn't even interested in talking about himself, he was only talking about architecture. Before his death, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York offered to hold a retrospective exhibition for the architect, but he also declined. Among the Pritzker Prize-winning architects, there are very few, if not unique, who have not held solo exhibitions before their deaths. But it was such a "boring" architect who left behind three hundred and thirty architectural works in thirty-one countries, including plans for the construction of a new capital, or landmark buildings that stand on the most emblematic prime parts of the capital. Architectural critic and professor Hiroyuki Suzuki of Aoyama Gakuin University said of this predecessor that "Kenzo Tange is the product of rare talents that resonate with rare times". Exuberant curiosity, extreme challenges to beauty and technology, rich overseas experience, proximity to power... All these things, changing people or changing eras, there is one thing that is enough to make people confused, or even completely change the way, but Tange, who can integrate them, has only achieved this one thing: the "monument" of the "KENZO TANGE" model has been built in Japan, the United States, and Europe, and the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia.
Tange and twin-tower structure, in Brasilia (courtesy of Hideyoshi Horikoshi)
Tange (second from right) in the Middle East
Tange, who is introducing the plan for Nigeria's new capital (from "From a Pencil", courtesy of The Three Cities and Architectural Design Institute of Tange)
Another Tangken architect, Kengo Kuma, believes that in a sense, "Tange is the architect of the capital (Tokyo). To be precise, it is the architect who carries the capital on his back." He further explains:
Architects who really have the ability to carry the capital are not one out of a hundred. Descendants such as Maki (Fumihiko), Isozaki (新), and Kurokawa (Kijo) were all outstanding architects. But if I ask them if they are carrying the capital, I think not necessarily. Their active main battlefield, subtly off center. Of course, perhaps they consciously avoided the center and found positive value in it. However, Tange never avoided the center. On the contrary, he discovered a special significance from the center and carried the responsibility of doing architecture in the center to the end... To carry the capital is to carry the country. The state, a complex whole that contains various opposites and unity, is summarized and integrated by the power of design. - "The Architect of the Capital," Tokyoer, November 2013 issue
On March 22, 2005, Kenzo Tange died in Tokyo at the age of ninety-one. In his later years, the architect was formally baptized, converted to Catholicism, and took the name "Joseph". According to the New Testament, Joseph was the husband of the Virgin Mary, the adoptive father of Jesus, and a carpenter. Dange's funeral was held in St. Mary's Cathedral in Tokyo, which he designed during his lifetime. In his eulogy, Isozaki called The Master "the master who tirelessly painted portraits of the nation, the first and the last." As a disciple, he certainly knew that Tange, who had set out from the ruins of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, had tirelessly painted a portrait of a post-war democratic country throughout his life. After the architect's death, in accordance with his will, his ashes were permanently preserved in the underground naku hall of St. Mary's Basilica. There, there is no distinction between good or bad feng shui and high or low position, all are arranged in chronological order of bones, "all beings are equal".
Kenzo Tange: Imagining Postwar Japan is a popular academic biography. The author, Toyokawa Saihe, is also a young architectural historian from the Department of Architecture of the Faculty of Engineering of UTokyo University, although he is separated from Tange, he has the same academic genes, and is familiar with post-war history, and analyzes the various line struggles entangled in the history of contemporary architecture. He outlines the trajectory of post-war Japan with thick lines, occasionally interacts with the career of architects, and three-dimensionally restores the unique architectural life of the master, while also sketching the "Tange School", an extremely important phenomenon in the history of contemporary architecture.
Behind the figure of the "great master" of Danxia, the great gods of the Danxia School, represented by the eight "little monks" of Danyan, are not only extraordinary in skill, but also have very different personalities, each with a strategy, and have left the nest at different times to stand on their own, exert their ambitions on the international stage, and have successively become masters who are no less well-known than Danxia. Some of them followed Tange and still tirelessly wandered to the scene of major construction projects in China, the United States and Europe, and were obsessed with using design blueprints to change the city and life; some of them became senior officials of the ministry of construction and the ministry of international trade and industry, and examined the city and buildings with a more macroscopic and lofty vision; some of them went from the proximity of the "national feast" project, toilet politics, keen to play stars in the mainstream media, and finally "died before the ambition was paid"; some people through "killing the father", To break free from the shackles of the famously conservative Oriental construction industry, to try to reconstruct the architectural language with different grammars... Although the paths are different and the choices are different, from the historical context, they all bear the birthmark of "TANGE". From The beginning of Tange himself to the many architects of the "Tange School", the hard work and creation of this group has not only changed the skyline of Japanese and world cities, but also is itself a post-war history refracted by the façade and glass curtain wall of the building. Success or failure is humbling and thought-provoking.
Suzuki Daisuke Memorial Hall "Water Mirror Garden" (minack/PIXTA) designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, a disciple of Tanken
Finally, it should be mentioned that this book was originally one of the "new books" of Iwanami Bookstore in Japan. According to Iwanami's traditional concept of de-professionalization of the new knowledge disseminated to the public in writing, there is no annotation in the original Japanese text. All footnotes in the Chinese edition are added by translators to facilitate Chinese readers' interpretation of relevant knowledge and background. In case of error, the responsibility lies with the translator.
(This article is a translation of the book "Kenzo Tange: Imagining Post-War Japan")
Editor-in-Charge: Zheng Shiliang
Proofreader: Liu Wei