Daily Inspiration Quote by Kenzo Tange

Tange’s line reads like a mild planning-school truism, but it’s really a warning shot from an architect who watched cities become machines, then watched the machines get smarter. “Technological considerations” isn’t just about better materials or faster elevators; it’s about the infrastructure of information itself: networks, logistics, media, and the invisible systems that decide how bodies move, where money concentrates, and which neighborhoods get upgraded or erased. In an “informational society,” the city’s most decisive architecture is often the stuff you don’t photograph.

The intent is pragmatic and strategic. Tange is arguing that architecture can’t pretend it’s only form, symbolism, or human-scale craft when the conditions of urban life are being rewritten by technology. Postwar Japan is the crucial context: rapid reconstruction, state-led modernization, the Tokyo Olympics as a global reintroduction, and the Metabolist-era confidence that cities could be designed like flexible, expandable organisms. Tange helped mainstream that ambition, where megastructures and systems-thinking weren’t sci-fi fantasies but a response to real density, real speed, real political pressure to perform “the future.”

The subtext is a critique of architectural romanticism. If architects ignore technology, the city will still be shaped by it - just by engineers, corporations, and bureaucracies instead. Read today, the phrase “informational society” lands even harder: sensors, platforms, surveillance, and predictive governance. Tange’s point isn’t techno-utopian; it’s about agency. Either architecture engages the operating system of the city, or it becomes decoration on top of someone else’s code.