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Design

Design of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum

Peace Memorial Park was designed by Kenzo Tange, who won a design competition sponsored by the city of Hiroshima. Entrants were asked to develop a comprehensive proposal for the entire memorial park and all related facilities.

Tange’s vision for the park was to create a universal and accessible symbol of peace and hope for Hiroshima. The buildings and monuments are low-rise but majestic, built in what Tange referred to as a merging of “human scale and social human scale.” The design is intentionally international and non-specific to Japan, because Tange felt that a symbol of eternal peace needed to be built in an inclusive style with few few formal references to individual nations.

“Peace does not come naturally; instead it has to be sought and obtained,” Tange said in a 1949 interview. “Peace is not what Mother Nature or Divinity bestows upon you but you practice and create it. This Hiroshima peace facility is not only for commemorating restored peace but for creating peace in a constructive way. We thought the facility we were about to work on had to be a factory where peace shall be created.”

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, located at the center of the park, contains a seminar room, library, temporary exhibition area, and victims’ information area. Near the entrance of the museum is a clock frozen at 8:15, the time the bomb went off. One of museum’s most stunning features is The Hall of Remembrance, which contains a 360-degree panorama of the destroyed Hiroshima, recreated using 140,000 tiles – the number of people estimated to have died from the bomb by the end of 1945.

Near the center of the park is the Flame of Peace, which has burned continuously since it was lit on August 1, 1964, and is meant to burn “until the day when all such weapons shall have disappeared from the earth.” The Flame of Peace is located on one side of the narrow Pond of Peace. Standing opposite the flame is the Cenotaph for the A-Bomb Victims, designed by Tange, which resembles an ancient arch-shaped house and is inscribed with the words, “Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil.” Under the arch, a stone chest holds a registry of all the names of people who died as a result of the bombing.

Across the river is the Children’s Peace Monument, where a statue of a girl with outstretched arms and a crane rising above her is dedicated to the memory of the children who died as a result of the bombing. The statue is based on the true story of a young girl who died from radiation. She believed that if she only folded 1,000 paper cranes, she would be cured. In her honor, people from all around the world have folded paper cranes and mailed them to Hiroshima.

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