Japanese architecture today is dominated by two men. The seventy-two-year-old Kenzo Tange, father of modern Japanese architecture, emerged as a major presence in the fifties; his protégé, Arata Isozaki, fifty-five, burst upon the world in the seventies.
Kenzo Tange virtually single-handedly introduced the Western concept of buildings designed by individual architects into Japan. Until some twenty-five years ago, architects in Japan worked basically in the country's large construction companies, which gave them little leeway for any artistic expression. With his design for the 1964 Olympic stadiums in Tokyo, Tange gave status to the individual architect. By the late sixties and early seventies, Tange and other Japanese architects, including Isozaki, designed astounding megastructures, bringing Japan into the global network of major influences on world architecture.
As Tange looks back on the buildings he created thirty years ago, he notes that tradition was a crucial issue in Japanese architecture in the mid-fifties, the years of the postwar economic boom. This was a time of great change; clinging to the traditions of the past offered psychological stability. Tange now characterizes that attitude as nostalgia. He is adamant in his belief that simply aping traditional forms is not enough. "Tradition cannot be copied, only succeeded," he says.
Stress of City Life
Tange is regarded as an authority on traditional architecture, having written a celebrated book on the early seventeenth-century Katsura Imperial Villa in the ancient capital, Kyoto. The building is considered a paragon of the traditional style: modular, open, and elegant. But Tange points out, sketching as he talks to illustrate his point, that this is not Japan's only architectural tradition. There is also a folk style, a heavier construction with a simple external form, that serves to shelter people from the threats of nature in the country or the stress of street life in the city. This other traditional form, less refined possibly, but more vigorous, can be viewed as an inspiration for the massive concrete structures built in Japan in the fifties and early sixties. The Takamatsu and Kurashiki government offices and several athletic centers designed by Tange, as well as Arata Isozaki's early major constructions, such as the Oita Prefectural Library (1964), are prime examples of this style of architecture.
Isozaki, a generation younger than Tange, is the most prominent of the many architects who have worked in Tange's atelier. He was a member of Tange's team for ten years and continued to collaborate with him for another ten, even after opening his own atelier. His work brings an underlying Japanese lyricism into the arena of international architecture. Few of his buildings, however, look specifically Japanese; all are designed with a certain provocative and innovative quality.
Isozaki recently completed the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, his first major free-standing building in America. It combines pyramids, a cylinder, and cubic forms, creating a great sense of calm and order. He uses solid geometric volumes with a rare clarity, yet never completely abandons a certain playfulness. In New York, Isozaki is best known for his interior design for the Palladium discotheque, a spectacular reworking of a massive thirties movie
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