Kenzō Tange decided to become an architect after finding drawings of Le Corbusier's Palace of the Soviets in a foreign journal, and spent a career arguing that a modern architecture could be specifically Japanese without being decorative about it. He trained at the University of Tokyo, worked briefly for Kunio Maekawa, and won a run of wartime national competitions before 1945. His reputation was made after the war by Hiroshima, where he planned the Peace Memorial Park and its museum, and consolidated by the Yoyogi gymnasiums of 1964 and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building of 1991. He taught Kisho Kurokawa, Arata Isozaki and Fumihiko Maki, and was mentor and patron to the Metabolists without joining them. Pritzker laureate in 1987; Royal Gold Medal in 1965.
