Archinect - News

Kenzo Tange's 'Boat Gymnasium' in Japan faces demolition

2023-02-21T14:52:00-05:00

An important Kenzo Tange design is facing an uncertain future in Japan’s Kagawa Prefecture after reports that authorities there are moving forward with the demolition of his 1964 “Boat Gymnasium” over disrepair and an apparent inability to fund seismic structural upgrades.

The Brutalist structure in Takamatsu was first shuttered in 2014 and has since been the subject of preservation pushes that unsuccessfully pressured the government to save the building, which shares many of the same stylistic elements as his masterwork Yoyogi National Gymnasium built the same year for the Olympic games in Tokyo.

The news comes almost a year removed from the final fate of the Kisho Kurokawa-designed Nakagin Capsule Tower, which is now being disbursed piecemeal to private enthusiasts and public collections after a long back-and-forth came to a close with preservationists on the losing end.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons user Bigjap (CC0 1.0)

The local Board of Education, which manages the gymnasi...

Toshiko Mori on style

2022-03-25T18:29:00-04:00

My architectural hero is Lina Bo Bardi. She was an amazing person. She was connected to society, communities, and construction crews. And also the fact that she's originally Italian, and established an identity in a place different from her place of origin (Brazil), resonated for me coming from Japan and establishing my practice in the United States. Navigating that territory, not only being a woman, but being a migrant as well.

A very nuanced interview with Toshiko Mori. "The former Chair of Harvard's graduate architecture program deems signature style irrelevant, favoring a versatile research-based approach. Beyond the load bearing structures of a building, Mori's examination of material matter excavates the complexities and contradictions of modern human phenomena."

First Kenzo Tange retrospective in Tokyo to be showcased at the National Archives of Modern Architecture

2021-07-14T19:58:00-04:00

The first major exhibition in Tokyo dedicated to Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kenzo Tange is opening later this month. Renowned for combining traditional Japanese and modernist forms in his designs, the exhibition features a retrospective of the first half of the influential architect’s career.

The exhibition titled, TANGE KENZO 1938-1970: From Pre-war period to Olympic Games and World Expo, is presented by the National Archives of Modern Architecture (NAMA), Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan, in cooperation with Tange Associates, Uchida Michiko, Tokyo Metropolitan Parks Association, Japan Arts Council, World Monuments Fund (WMF), American Express, DOCOMOMO Japan, and The Museum of Art, Kochi.

As Tokyo hosts the 2021 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the exhibition commemorates Tange’s leading role in realizing the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the Osaka World Expo in 1970.

Previously on Archinect: Tokyo's 1964 Olympics architecture remembered

The showcase explores the first half of T...

Like father, like son for Paul Tange's Tokyo Aquatics Center

2021-07-02T15:25:00-04:00

Father and son duos have been prominent in the past 50 or so years of sports history. Ken Griffey Jr. and his father, the Ripkens, Curry’s, Mannings, and many others. Now, with the Olympic games coming back to their home country, one Pritzker-pedigreed combination is leaving its mark on the sports world in a much different way.

Paul and Kenzo Noritaka Tange are the architects behind designs for two Olympic aquatics venues, spread 57 years apart, that will make history when the games begin in Tokyo later this month.

Aerial view of Tokyo's Yoyogi National Gymnasium, designed by Kenzo Tange and built between 1961 and 1964. Photo: Arne Müseler / arne-mueseler.com / CC-BY-SA-3.0

The elder Tange completed Yoyogi National Gymnasium in time for the 1964 Olympic Summer Games. Featuring a spiral roof structure that the architect said was inspired by suspension bridges and Eero Saarinen’s Ingalls Rink at Yale University, the original Tange building took only two years to build and was finished...

Tokyo's 1964 Olympics architecture remembered

2020-07-31T14:12:00-04:00

The coronavirus pandemic has forced the Olympics’s first postponement: Tokyo 2020, its name unchanged, will now take place in July 2021 if it takes place at all. Yet all around the Japanese capital is the legacy of another Olympics: the 1964 Summer Games, which crowned Tokyo’s 20-year transformation from a firebombed ruin to an ultramodern megalopolis.

NYT art critic Jason Farago takes a look back at the now iconic architectural and visual design — and its transformative power — of the 1964 Olympic Summer Games in the Japanese capital, 19 years after WWII had ended.

"Those first Tokyo Olympics served as a debutante ball for democratic, postwar Japan, which reintroduced itself to the world not only through sport but also through design," writes Farago.

New map charts the radical and visionary Modernist architecture of Skopje

2018-09-07T13:58:00-04:00

A new map featuring the modernist architecture of Skopje has been released by Blue Crow Media, the publishing company behind a popular series of Brutalist architecture maps. Their latest release, the Modernist Skopje Map, graphs the radical and visionary architecture of the Macedonian capital, detailing over forty buildings and structures.

The city plays host to an abundance of Communist-era Brutalist and Modernist architecture. Rocked by a devastating earthquake in 1963, Skopje was largely built up by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, who won an international competition to lead the urban reconstruction of the city center. With a particular focus on concrete brutalism, Tange and his team of international architects masterplanned the rebuilt capital, their retro-futuristic influences still apparent today.

From the The Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, to the Saints Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, pockets of these original modernist buildings remain and are spotl...