Tange was born in Sakai, Osaka in 1913. He moved to Hankou, Shanghai and later England, with his banker father, back to Japan in 1920. Tange was strongry influenced by Le Corbusier's books and thought to be an architect in his secondary school days.
In 1935, Tange attended at the Department of Engineering, the University of Tokyo, where he studied architecture, completed his degree and worked as a professional architect at the studio of Kunio Maekawa. Tange worked a few years there and left, backed to the University of Tokyo to study postgraduate course in 1941. Tange became an assistant professor and opened Tange laboratory in 1946; he was promoted to professor of the Department of Urban Engineering in 1963. As a professor, Tange his students included Sachio Otani, Kisho Kurokawa, Arata Isozaki, and Fumihiko Maki who have inherited Tange's architectural style and his philosophy.
In 1949, Tange won the architecture competition for design of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima city, following its atomic bombing in 1945. His design for Peace Memorial Park owes much to Le Corbusier and is often called "the spiritual core of the city." One reason Tange gave for applying for the job was that he had studied in the city as a secondary student.
Tange won international fame for his design for the gymnasium for the 1964 Summer Olympics held in Tokyo. His Pritzker Prize citation described it as "among the most beautiful buildings of the 20th century".
He was also known for his "Tokyo Plan" of 1960, which proposed a radical redesign of the city. Although not fully implemented, it influenced architects worldwide. Tange received AIA Gold Medal in 1966, the Order of Culture in 1980, and the order of the Sacred Treasures in 1994.
In 2005, his funeral was held in one of his works, Tokyo Cathedral.
From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenzo_Tange
Text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License
| Worked wirh Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier)
Students included Arata Isozaki and Kisho Kurokawa
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