Once at Mia: Mondale and the Modern Museum

December 8, 2025—Kenzo Tange had resurrected Hiroshima, literally from the ashes. He designed a peace park in the city center and massive, modern buildings to house the thousands of bureaucrats who helped revive Japan. An admirer of both Le Corbusier—whose style was known for its functionalism, simplicity, and geometric forms—and traditional Japanese architecture, he built a bridge into the postwar period. By the time he was tapped to build an addition for Mia, in the early 1970s, he had become a global modernist icon.

Walter Mondale, too, was trying to bring the world into a kinder, gentler era. In 1972, when construction began on the new Tange addition, he was beginning his second term as a U.S. senator from Minnesota, focused on civil rights and public health. When the new Mia building opened on October 6, 1974, with 14,000 visitors in attendance, Mondale was exploring a presidential run.

He spoke at the opening along with his fellow Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, Governor Wendell Anderson, Minneapolis Mayor Al Hofstede, and Ambassador of Japan to the United States Takeshi Yasukawa. No exhibitions had been held at the museum since construction began. Only a few shows had been displayed in absentia, in the IDS tower in downtown Minneapolis. It was the beginning of a new era.

For Mondale, it was the end of one—less than two months later, he would declare an end to his presidential ambitions. He lacked the “overwhelming desire,” he said, and dreaded another year of “sleeping in Holiday Inns.” But he would soon be tapped by Jimmy Carter for vice president, and both Mia and Mondale would enter the mid-1970s with much more room to assert themselves.