St. Mary's Cathedral, Tokyo

This guide to St. Mary's Cathedral in Tokyo starts with a 1945 firebombing that destroyed the wooden Gothic church French missionaries had built here in 1899, and the years the city's Catholics spent worshipping in a military hut while the archdiocese debated what to build next. It follows the 1960 competition that pitted architect Kenzo Tange's radical concrete design against more conventional entries, and the postwar German funding that helped raise it. Construction ran from 1963 into 1964, a quiet act of reconciliation between two former wartime enemies.