Resurrecting St. Mary’s Cathedral
24/09/2021
In a city where Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples abound, a Catholic cathedral is an unexpected sight. Nonetheless, Tokyo's St. Mary's Cathedral is one of the world's most famous churches. Designed in the early 1960s by master architect Kenzo Tange, its stainless steel-clad shape was ahead of its time – both in terms of its architecture and of the available technology of the day. To fix some of the resulting problems, the cathedral was re-clad after 40 years with a molybdenum-containing ferritic stainless steel certain to last a lifetime.