His work was faithful to the Athens Charter of the CIAM until the late 1960s, when his work became less rigid and more organic.

Raymond Lopez, the advising architect at the Paris city hall, and his assistant Michel Holley, considered this renovation to be an opportunity to completely reorganize those areas, in the spirit of the Athens charter and Le Corbusier.

The Athens Charter for the Restoration of Historic Monuments is a seven point manifesto adopted at the First International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments in Athens in 1931.

The "Athens Charter" promoted the idea that a city gains character from its continual changes over many years; this notion was written before the advent of mass bombings and the Second World War and therefore held little meaning for Tange who had evidenced the destruction of Hiroshima.