An Elegant Sweep Toward Heaven

By KURT ANDERSEN

As the work of young Japanese architects acquires cachet and stirs interest around the world, it is fitting that the elder statesman of Japanese design, Kenzo Tange, 73, should become the first of his countrymen to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The $100,000 award, announced last week, went to one of the most important modernists of his generation, a master builder who can point to a body of work that is large, far-flung and confident. Tange was a committed and conscientious designer in the International Style during its heyday, a modernist who resisted the easiest answers of modernism during his prime.

Wealthy, media savvy and hypersensitive to professional status, Tange is something like a Japanese Philip Johnson, but with Le Corbusier as his guru instead of Mies van der Rohe. As a teenager, Tange saw Corbusier's drawings for two huge public buildings, and he was smitten. "Right then and there," he says, "I decided to be an architect."

It was 20 years before he built his first building, but he remained in thrall to Corbusier and concrete and public architecture. Tange was well- suited by temperament and history to be a Corbusian. The French master's stark, sweeping forms have the purity of Zen monoliths, and concrete was a practical material for rebuilding bombed-out, impoverished Japan. Tange's first realized design was archetypally postwar: the Hiroshima Peace Center. * Finished in stages during the early 1950s, the complex is a complete preview, in miniature,of Tange's architectural career. Nearly all of his low-rise, high-modern ideas are on display: the International Style box, the inverted cone, the rough concrete pillars, the swooping concrete shell. The details have a light touch; the forms are blessedly simple. Tange's best designs embody heavenward sweep, a figurative and literal uplift. The central feature of a printing plant in Numazu (1954) is a great set of steel trusses, a wing- like cantilever from which the factory's glass walls hang. It is one of the more elegant postwar industrial buildings. St. Mary's Cathedral in Tokyo is a kind of Gothic abstraction, two enormous concrete shells sandwiched together and suspended from above, covered in an acre of stainless steel.

But his masterpieces are the side-by-side stadiums for the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. The structures are playful siblings, not identical twins, the forms clearly modern but vaguely ancient. What Tange has called "two huge comma shapes out of alignment" reminds us how satisfying form following function can be. Instead of the usual Rube Goldberg arena system of numbered entrances and exit ramps, the single wide mouths of the Olympic stadiums show themselves unequivocally.

In the late '60s and '70s, Tange's work too often became elephantine and dull: the master plan for Expo '70 in Osaka, palaces for Arab princes, concrete campuses and glossy high-rises in Singapore. It is telling that after architecture's thrusting edge left Tange behind, leaders of developing countries showed a special affinity for his messianic modernism and his eagerness to think big (really big: the campus for King Saud University outside Riyadh will cover 4 sq. mi.). In architecture today, Tange says, "there is not big-scale thinking." Nor is there sufficient "discipline," by which he means adherence to guiding design orthodoxies. He clearly pines for the certainties of the '50s and '60s, when Olympian notions of urban planning were unchallenged. Tange still insists that cities should be forced to expand along straight lines, not allowed to grow in the traditional laissez-faire hodgepodge. He has the hubris to suggest that a city skyline should be made to conform with a pre-determined sculptural pattern. Above all, he believes in order.

He disapproves of the free-for-all stylistic approach of postmodernism: "I think postmodernism is just transitional. I don't believe it will last." So ! he preaches. But his practice, it turns out at this late date, is another matter. His design for a new Tokyo city government complex seems a remarkable departure. True to form, it will be big (3.5 million sq. ft.) and orderly, but the main building is unmodernistic by any reckoning: twin spires with Manhattanish art deco setbacks, a highly sculptural facade of glass and granite intended to evoke Japanese koshi latticework. It is as if John Cage suddenly began composing catchy melodies or Frank Stella turned to painting cute portraits. Is Tange merely accommodating fashion? "You simply cannot have any kind of deadpan glass box," he says, to stand as the new symbol of Tokyo. The explanation is offhanded, and no elaboration is forthcoming. He will not say it, but the new municipal hall is a sort of surrender, on eleventh-hour apostasy. When Kenzo Tange disavows glass boxes, an era has ended.