Design: An Elegant Sweep Toward Heaven

As the work of young Japanese architects acquires cachet and stirs interest around the world, it is fitting that the elder statesman of Japanese design, Kenzo Tange, 73, should become the first of his countrymen to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The $100,000 award, announced last week, went to one of the most important modernists of his generation, a master builder who can point to a body of work that is large, far-flung and confident. Tange was a committed and conscientious designer in the International Style during its heyday, a modernist who resisted the easiest answers of modernism during his prime.

Wealthy, media savvy and hypersensitive to professional status, Tange is something like a Japanese Philip Johnson, but with Le Corbusier as his guru instead of Mies van der Rohe. As a teenager, Tange saw Corbusier's drawings for two huge public buildings, and he was smitten. "Right then and there," he says, "I decided to be an architect."

It was 20 years before he built his first building, but he remained in thrall to Corbusier and concrete and public architecture. Tange was well- suited by temperament and history to be a Corbusian. The French master's stark, sweeping forms have the purity of Zen monoliths, and concrete was a practical material for rebuilding bombed-out, impoverished Japan. Tange's first realized design was archetypally postwar: the Hiroshima Peace Center. * Finished in stages during the early 1950s, the complex is a complete preview, in miniature,of Tange's architectural career. Nearly all of his low-rise, high-modern ideas are on display: the International Style box, the inverted cone, the rough concrete pillars, the swooping concrete shell. The details have a light touch; the forms are blessedly simple. Tange's best designs embody heavenward sweep, a figurative and literal uplift. The central feature of a printing plant in Numazu (1954) is a great set of steel trusses, a wing- like cantilever from which the factory's glass walls hang. It is one of the more elegant postwar industrial buildings. St. Mary's Cathedral in Tokyo is a kind of Gothic abstraction, two enormous concrete shells sandwiched together and suspended from above, covered in an acre of stainless steel.

But his masterpieces are the side-by-side stadiums for the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. The structures are playful siblings, not identical twins, the forms clearly modern but vaguely ancient. What Tange has called "two huge comma shapes out of alignment" reminds us how satisfying form following function can be. Instead of the usual Rube Goldberg arena system of numbered entrances and exit ramps, the single wide mouths of the Olympic stadiums show themselves unequivocally.