Modernism in Hiroshima

After the end of the war, the writing of its new constitution, and the re-establishment of a Japanese civil government, the city of Hiroshima decided to build a memorial to the atomic bombing of the city. The competition for the design was won by the architect Kenzō Tange. A beautiful element of this design was to align the axis of the cenotaph memorial to the dead with the remnant of the Genbaku dome. That is the remnant of a dome built in 1915 to the design of the Czech architect Jan Letzel. The cenotaph brings to my mind torii, the doors which lead to spiritual spaces in Japan. So I was delighted to find that Tange attributes the hyperbolic paraboloid shape of the structure to some of the earliest Japanese religious structures.

In the photo above you see the long axis of the Peace Museum. This is aligned to the same axis along which the view in the featured photo was taken. Tange later won the Pritzker Prize for his design of the St. Mary’s Church in Tokyo. But this modernist museum is my own favourite. Perhaps that is because it reminds me of the building in which I have been fortunate enough to spend most of my working life. In a certain sense modernism is not foreign to Japan; its traditional architecture uses the clean lines and repeating elements of modernist architecture. But more importantly, by using pillars as load-bearing elements in a building, modernist architecture can open up the walls and melt the separation between inside and outside of the building. This approach parallels the sliding panels of some traditional Japanese structures.

Opening up the walls of a building, or making it of glass, makes sense only when the outside has the kind of light and appearance which you want to bring into your living. The open park-like setting of the Peace Memorial and the Peace Boulevard that connects it to the rest of the city is exactly the kind of view that you might want modernist structures to open into. It brings to mind Japanese gardens with their viewing pavilions and tea houses. When we walked through it, the space was green. Azaleas were blooming everywhere, and among the green leaves of momiji I could spot a couple of lovely Japanese red maple trees. The curtains of paper cranes draped on various shrines inside the park express a sentiment which echoes Einstein’s reaction to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima: “The time has come now, when man must give up war.”