Tange won the 1949 competition for the Peace Memorial Park with a scheme that was really one idea: an axis, running north from the museum through the cenotaph to the ruined dome of the Industrial Promotion Hall, so that the surviving wreck is framed for anyone standing under the building. The museum is the instrument of that view. Raised on pilotis, it leaves the ground open and lets the park pass beneath; the long elevations are shaded by concrete louvres proportioned on a set of mathematical ratios Tange used throughout. Construction began in 1951 and was suspended for three years when national funding fell short, resuming only when the city met the balance; the main hall opened in August 1955, ten years after the bomb. It was among the first Japanese postwar buildings to be recognised internationally, and in 2006 the first to be designated an Important Cultural Property.
The museum stands on the Nakajima district, before 1945 the busiest commercial and residential quarter of Hiroshima and, after the atomic bomb of 6 August 1945, an open field. Estimates of the direct and indirect dead run to around 140,000. The park was laid out on that ground; the ruin of the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the structure nearest the hypocentre left partly standing, was preserved as the A-Bomb Dome and inscribed on the World Heritage List on 7 December 1996. Between 1956 and 1967 part of the museum was given over to displays promoting the peaceful use of atomic energy, first for a travelling exhibition and later as an "Atomic Science Hall"; visitors complained of a split message, and the peaceful-use material was removed in May 1967.
Wikidata Q1200076 · Commons: File:Hiroshima_Peace_Memorial_Museum_20170310.jpg · Photo: そらみみ · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0