1970 – Embassy of Kuwait – Kenzo Tange

1970 – Embassy of Kuwait – Kenzo Tange

1970 – Embassy of Kuwait – Kenzo Tange

The project consists of two distinct parts: the ambassador’s residence and the chancellery. Since the building program has these two distinct spaces, one chooses to place them according to their private or public appearance. Thus, on the first floors of the chancery building it is located while on top residence and dining room is located, clearly turned towards the courtyard as they would the typical Arab houses, giving privacy to the rooms. Despite this provision and space division, both have a common entrance.

The program centers around two vertical communication is distributed. On the ground floor is the entrance courtyard and lobby. From these one can go to the residence and access your waiting room or to access their respective embassy and waiting room. The basement is divided into two spaces at different heights containing the garage and the engine room. As one moves into the building first space is dedicated to the Foreign Ministry and then own the house of the ambassador.

1967 – Shizuoka Tower – Kenzo Tange

Built in the Ginza district, the Shizuoka Tower gave Tange a chance to materialize his Metabolist ideals, which called for a new urban typology that could self perpetuate in an organic, vernacular, “metabolic” manner. The narrow, 189 square-meter, triangular site inspired Tange to design a vertical structure, consisting of a main infrastructural core, which could develop into an urban megastructure, into which an ever-growing number of prefabricated capsules could be “plugged-in.”

The infrastructural core was a 7.7 meter diameter cylinder, reaching a height of 57 meters, containing stairs, two elevators, and a kitchen and sanitary facilities on each floor. The core served as an access shaft to the modular office units: cantilever glass and steel boxes of 3.5 meters which punctuated the main core on alternating sides. A total of thirteen individual offices were arranged in five groups of two or three modules connected asymmetrically to the central beam. Balconies formed in the gaps between the clusters, allowing for future units to potentially be “plugged-in,” an idea which never materialized. The structure today has the same amount of units as when first erected in 1967, and so Tange’s Metabolist vision for a perpetually regenerating, prefabricated urban megastructure was never fulfilled.

In 1967, Yukari Bunka Kindergarten by Kenzo Tange was established. The architect choose  the spatial dimension to be comfortable to the children’s scale. The plan of the kindergarten has a radial arrangement. Each roof unit has in a strict sense a shape of a cone rather than a circular cylinder. In the original design the roof was to consist of prefabricated prestressed members. It was found, however, that some parts of the streets connecting the factory and the building site were too narrow to accommodate transportation of the prefabricated roof units. Therefore, we decided to “prefabricate” them in the site.

Built for the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo the Yoyogi National Gymnasium has become an architectural icon for its distinctive design.  Designed by one of Japan’s most famous modernist architects, Kenzo Tange, the gymnasium is a hybridization of western modernist aesthetics and traditional Japanese architecture. Tange’s innovative structural design creates dramatic sweeping curves that appear to effortlessly drape from two large, central supporting cables. It’s dynamically suspended roof and rough materials form one of the most iconic building profiles in the world.