Proposal to revive Kenzo Tange's Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium wins Radical Renewal Competition
Designer Ethan Akiyama Poh has won Dezeen and Bentley's Radical Renewal Competition with a concept that reimagines architect Kenzo Tange's disused post-war gymnasium, currently facing demolition, as a thriving civic destination.
Akiyama Poh proposed reprogramming Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Tange's Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium, which is currently unoccupied and threatened with demolition due to seismic and spatial limitations.
Called New Ground, Akiyama Poh's proposal would preserve the gymnasium by recontextualising it within the city of Takamatsu.
The building was re-envisioned as a food hall celebrating produce from the Seto Inland Sea, surrounded by offices and public spaces to generate long-term economic and cultural value.
By retaining the structure while introducing new layers of use and meaning, the proposal positions the gymnasium as both a regional landmark and a contemporary model for adaptive reuse.
The proposal also draws on Tange's use of metabolist principles – a Japanese post-war architectural movement that explored architectural megastructures and the idea of buildings evolving like living organisms.
Echoing this approach, the design derives a new structural grid from the gymnasium to form a unifying field that bridges roads, connecting to neighbouring structures and embedding the gymnasium more firmly in its urban context.
Kagawa Prefecture had previously commissioned Tange in 1958 to design its governmental office building, which became a post-war prototype for democratic public architecture in Japan and is still in use today.
Six years later, it asked him to design a gymnasium, coinciding with his commission for the Yoyogi National Gymnasium in Tokyo.
Although the two gymnasiums share a formal similarity, they went on to have contrasting fates.
Yoyogi became a national symbol of sport in the capital city and was refurbished for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, while its regional counterpart in Takamatsu has been left vacant and faces demolition.
The Radical Renewal Competition invited architects and designers to select a building of historical significance – whether an iconic landmark, a celebrated local structure or an overlooked building in need of revival – and propose a forward-thinking design transformation to rejuvenate it.
The contest coincided with the unveiling of Bentley's new Design Centre, which opened in July this year in an art deco building originally constructed in 1938 as a reception hub for Bentley's factory in Crewe, United Kingdom.
The proposal was selected by a panel of judges comprising designers and journalists from Bentley and Dezeen.
"This project beautifully considers how this iconic Kenzo Tange structure can be reimagined and revived for 21st-century uses," Dezeen's editorial director Max Fraser said.
"The world is full of buildings, including this one, that were built to serve the needs of their time but then fall out of favour."
"Due to the immense embodied carbon from their construction, we have a duty to consider how these structures can be adapted to fit the needs of today. This must be our priority before demolition is ever considered – this project fully embraces those ideals," he continued.
Read more about the proposal below:
New Ground by Ethan Akiyama Poh
New York City, USA
First place
"The two gymnasiums are twins, separated at birth – engineered by different structural engineers but both designed by Tange. While Yoyogi became a national symbol, the Kagawa gymnasium now sits empty, with ceilings too low for modern sports and in need of costly seismic upgrades.
"My project recontextualises the gymnasium in Takamatsu as a symbol of the region by an extension of its existing service level, which is extended around the building to form a new datum – a new understanding of the figural form of the building.
"The gymnasium is visually lifted off the ground and floats upon a new horizon surrounded by programmatic islands within a field of structural members.
"The structural elements within the gymnasium are exposed and steel structures are also inserted between the columns and beams to form stalls, from which local food and produce is sold. The interior becomes the largest of the programmatic islands, the origin of the field generated around it.
"A new structural grid is derived from the existing gymnasium grid – deployed as a prefabricated CLT framework that allows for an ever-growing, expanding field around the gymnasium.
"At the urban scale, the field creates a visual unity around the gymnasium, bridging over roads, relating to existing buildings and connecting the large concrete building to the site.
"At the building scale, steel structures are inserted within the field condition. These steel structures are grouped in clusters, creating programmatic islands of more definitive spaces while allowing the rest of the field to be a flexible open plan.
"At the human scale, these steel structures create gathering spaces, enclosed rooms, tables and benches. The new datum, with its flexible field and programmatic islands, ties the building complex to its economic site.
"The design strategy draws upon the architectural precedents of Tange's Expo 70 – framing the gymnasium within an oculus. Utilising ideas of Metabolism, the gymnasium is contextualised within a set of architectural ideas that situate the Tange building within its place in architectural history and urban context.
"The gymnasium becomes both a visual and economic symbol of the region, attracting tourism and business alike."
Dezeen and Bentley's Radical Renewal Competition is a global contest seeking bold architectural proposals to modernise historic buildings while preserving their heritage.
The contest received entries from more than 27 countries around the world.
A selection of 15 innovative proposals were shortlisted by the judges and published on Dezeen earlier this month.
The judges ultimately selected New Ground by Akiyama Poh as the overall winner of the competition.
Akiyama Poh has received a top prize of £15,000 for his winning proposal, while Raymond Lapiejko received £10,000 for Hoosac Stores Recycling and Repair Center and Zixuan Luo received £5,000 for Between Skin and Bone.
Find out more about the Radical Renewal Competition ›
Partnership content
The Radical Renewal Competition is a partnership between Dezeen and Bentley. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.
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