Hiroshima peace memorial museum architect

Hiroshima Peace Memorial

Kenzo Tange

1965

Daniela Gallardo Bremer

Through the centuries, architecture has led to the writing of articles and books to explain what architects can do, what it means, and how it affects people and the surroundings. Even though no particular time in history has the problem of architecture’s activity involved more contradictory views than in the second half of the twentieth century.

Hiroshima was reduced to ashes by the atomic bomb of August 6, 1945, at the end of World War II. There were many fatalities, and the reconstruction of lives in Hiroshima after the war was an enormous task. Subsequently the war, the city of Hiroshima created a master plan: mainly designing and adding roads and recreational areas to the center of the city. However, the postwar reform of the city had to be paralyzed due to financial difficulties. To make a breakthrough, Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law was enacted in 1949, letting individual assistance from the central government. Whit this law, transferring state owned land to the city was also made possible. When this law was enacted, a design competition for the Peace Memorial Park and Museum was held, targeting one of the three main parks designed in the city’s main plan, The Nakajima Park. Kenzo Tange’s group was awarded the first prize. Founded on this design, plans for the accomplishment of the project were established.[endnoteRef:1] [1: Otani, 1950.]

At that time Tange’s topographies were: First, the main floor of the museum building, a rectangular major structure in the park, was on piloti. This feature was merged into the actual building, which is now one of the most symbolic postwar buildings in Japan. The second main characteristic that Tange’s plan proposed an “axis” that prolonged from the center of the museum structure through the center of the arched Peace Tower to the atomic bomb dome. The Peace Memorial Building can be considered Modern mainly because the way the architect applied Le Corbusier’s five points towards a new architecture.

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The architect wanted to include a children library inside the memorial park, but they decided it was not a good idea bearing in mind that this was going to be a memorial park to those citizens who had died as a result of the atomic bomb. Also, they decided to keep the entire building under one roof to make it more useful since the park is planned to be use in a daily basis by Hiroshima’s people rather than being a memorial park where individuals only visit once a year when the date of the occurrence has reached. By creating a memorial where people can visit on a daily basis, he is reminding the people what happened in Hiroshima and creating awareness on younger generations. The plaza that is in front of the memorial park can approximately hold around 50 thousand people, which was designed mainly to hold the spectators that attend the annual commemoration traditionally.[endnoteRef:2] This area was considered a key achievement of this building, because it was developed later on the project’s design. [2: Otani, 1950. Giamo, Benedict. 2003. “The Myth of the Vanquished: The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum”. American Quarterly 55 (4). Johns Hopkins University Press: 703–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30042004. Sakamoto, Tsuto. 2004. "Kenzo Tange's discourse on tradition: texts and photographs of Hiroshima Peace Center in 1954." Journal Of Southeast Asian Architecture 7, 59-68. Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, EBSCOhost (accessed April 4, 2016).]