Born in Osaka, Japan on September 4, 1913, Kenzo Tange was one of the foremost architects of the twenty century, and was considered a genius for the buildings he designed throughout his prolific career. He designed more buildings in his lifetime than legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
He was brought up in modest circumstances in the small city of Imabari, on Shikoku Island. He became interested in architecture during high school, but he wasn’t the best math student, so he had to work extremely hard to get into a university.
In 1935, he was accepted to the University of Tokyo’s architecture department. Three years after, he got his first job under Kunio Maekawa, a well-known Japanese architect at that time, who had practiced with Le
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Outside Japan Tange was overly modern; he was responsible for the design of some of the most notable buildings including embassies and university buildings in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Iran, Algeria, the Kuwait International Airport, Supreme Court of Pakistan, Singapore’s National Library, Chicago’s American Medical Association Building, and the master plan for Skopje, the capital city of Macedonia. In his later structures he built up combinations of smaller geometric forms into an irregular but functionally attentive whole.
Kenzo Tange died of a heart ailment on March 22, 2005 in Tokyo.
The most influential figure in post-war Japanese architecture, Kenzo Tange was profoundly influenced by the work of Corbusier. If Tange began by imitating the late-flowering, sculptural concrete designs of the Swiss-French genius, he went on to create a body of internationally recognized work that was very much his own, fusing traditional Japanese forms with the very latest in structural daring.
Kenzo Tange was the lead architect in the movement of modernism of Japan. He did not disregard the traditional architecture of Japan though, and he often made a point to incorporate modern and traditional in his