Daily Inspiration Quote by Kenzo Tange

Tange’s sentence reads like a polite memo, but it’s really a manifesto smuggled in through bureaucracy. “Further consideration” sounds deferential, almost technocratic; the subtext is that the existing debate about modern architecture has stalled because it’s arguing over style when the real question is systems. He’s positioning architecture as an instrument panel for a society rewired by information: not just new shapes, but new logics of circulation, communication, and scale.

The key move is the phrase “informational society,” which in his era signaled more than computers. It meant management, networks, media saturation, and a new tempo of urban life. Tange is telling his peers that the city’s old metaphors - monument, street, neighborhood - are becoming insufficient if the real infrastructure is invisible: data, signals, organizational flows. That’s why he frames the present as an “impasse.” Postwar modernism had produced both utopian megastructures and alienating slabs; critics were circling familiar grievances. Tange’s wager is that the next exit isn’t a return to ornament or nostalgia, but a recalibration of what cities are for when information becomes the dominant commodity and coordination becomes the dominant task.

Context matters: Japan’s rapid postwar growth and Tokyo’s transformation gave Tange a front-row seat to urban acceleration, including ambitious state-and-corporate planning and the Metabolist fascination with expandable, modular futures. The line’s quiet authority is strategic: he invites consensus (“help us”), while asserting that the profession must evolve from making objects to designing adaptable frameworks.