The Urbanism of Metabolism

Visions, Scenarios and Models for the Mutant City of Tomorrow

Raffaele Pernice, Raffaele Pernice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000539486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

This edited book explores and promotes reflection on how the lessons of Metabolism experience can inform current debate on city making and future practice in architectural design and urban planning. More than sixty years after the Metabolist manifesto was published, the author's original contributions highlight the persistent links between present and past that can help to re-imagine new urban futures as well as the design of innovative intra-urban relationships and spaces.

The essays are written by experienced scholars and renowned academics from Japan, Australia, Europe, South Korea and the United States and expose Metabolism's special merits in promoting new urban models and evaluate the current legacy of its architectural projects and urban design lessons. They offer a critical, intellectual, and up-to-date account of the Metabolism projects and ideas with regard to the current evolution of architectural and urbanism discourse in a global context.

The collection of cross-disciplinary contributions in this volume will be of great interest to architects, architectural and urban historians, as well as academics, scholars and students in built environment disciplines and Japanese cultural studies.

1 Back from Behind the Curtain of Oblivion Metabolism and the Postwar Actuality of Japan

Hajime Yatsuka

DOI: 10.4324/9781003186540-2

Metabolism has been one of the benchmarks of modern Japanese architecture since the 1960s. However, the passage of time has brought the movement to the edge of oblivion. Due to its futuristic outlook, the Metabolists’ projects now seem to belong in the past, a past which was never realized—mere fragments of dreams on paper. This fundamentally negative reflection of the movement partly reflects the enormous difference between Japan now and then; most Japanese people today tend to regard the issues of the 1960s as somehow wrong. To our regret, both the design and theories of Metabolists are of no concern to the present anti-intellectualism. Only stereotypical images of Metabolism, such as the megastructures and capsules, remain in ruins, deprived of historical significance. These images, without historical context, look simply utopian. This chapter will set them right against the reality of Japan in their time.

1

This chapter shall start with two projects: Kiyonori Kikutake’s Tower-Shaped Community and Kisho Kurokawa’s Agricultural City. Both projects were exhibited in the 1960 Visionary Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, curated by Arthur Drexler, and displayed official images of the Metabolists’ work to the West. In the same year, the World Design Conference in Tokyo provided the occasion for the group to launch their works to the global design community. Drexler must have been impressed by the brochure of their works, distributed at the conference as the first manifesto of the group.

These two architects, more than any other members of the group, represented the utopian aspect of the movement—if we are still to characterize their work as such. However, it should be noted that these projects were designed not for tabulae rasae, but for sites with specific conditions—for example, agricultural hinterlands that were often damaged by floods caused by typhoons, which had been ignored overseas. Unlike many utopian projects in the West, the locations of the projects presented the core issue that those projects faced. Disasters such as floods are outcomes of natural and geopolitical conditions, and the damage is still a serious problem worldwide, which has now been accelerated by global warming.

2

Traditional agricultural districts were controlled by feudal landlords.Kikutake was from such a wealthy family. However, immediately after the war, his family lost their vast territory through the Occupation Army’s 1947 Agricultural Land Reform Law, which aimed to liberate farmers from the feudal, prewar system. The future architect was 18 years old at the time and remembered this disgrace well. He never admitted that such ancient social systems were feudalistic and irrational. Later, he insisted that the officers from the postwar national government knew nothing of the reality of the Japanese agricultural community. However, in the milieu of postwar Japanese democracy, the young and promising architect was obliged to keep silent on the issue. It was only toward the end of his life that he began to express his criticism of postwar democracy. He mentioned it to me privately and in an interview with Rem Koolhaas, which was published in Project Japan. Koolhaas was greatly surprised by Kikutake’s remark that his indignation underlay his projects—quite an unexpected comment from the ultra-modernist.¹

When the architect built his 1958 home, the well-known Sky House, it contained only one room, raised above the ground on bulky concrete piers. He called its central area a symbolic “space for a couple’s love.” The candid label indicated his intentions to establish an archetypal home for a young couple in the new society. Accordingly, his house was hailed as a crystallization of the postwar democratic ideal. However, for Kikutake, in the depth of his mind, this space was a successor to an interior space of the farmhouses (Minka) in the countryside of his hometown—a large, central space open to every neighbor, the center of the community dominated by their godmother, his grandmother. In Sky House, areas for future children were to be added later, suspended from the main floor slab—as secondary, temporary living equipment, true to the idea of Metabolism (Figure 1.1). Dialectics between the raised floor acted as a supporting structure for the children’s equipment. The planning of Sky House was provocative and coincided with a period when planners were trying to modernize traditional life and homes. Kikutake leaped from the prewar extended family to a minimum social unit of only one couple, bypassing postwar ideology that emphasized the importance of the nuclear family.

FIGURE 1.1 Sketch of Kiyonori Kikutake’s Sky House, 1958. Image: collection of the architect’s family.

His transmodern avant-gardism was also incorporated in the 1959 Tower-Shaped Community project and its deviation, the Koto ward project (Figure 1.2). It was planned for the downtown area of Tokyo, most of which was lower than sea level and frequently flooded. Kikutake, who recently came to the capital city to attend the Waseda University, confronted the same situation there with his hometown. Kikutake’s project restructured the mixed-use area consisting of townhouses and small factories as vertical, artificial land with a huge tower to which individual small units of dwellings were attached.

FIGURE 1.2 Digital reproduction of Koto ward project by Kiyonori Kikutake, 1959. Image: author’s collection.

At ground level, vast square platforms measuring 200 m by 200 m were used as plinths for the tower, following the existing grid of the downtown area. They were designed as sunken plazas, which were planned as reservoirs in the event of a flood. These plinths scarcely attract the concern of the people in the design community. Their concern was exclusively directed toward the tower-shaped megastructure and the capsule units he called “move-nets.” Yet, for Kikutake, the plinths were of primary significance.

The structures that are ultimately safe against floods are floating structures. Since the Tower-Shaped Community project, Kikutake became obsessed with floating cities. The Marine City project, proposed in the same year as the Tower-Shaped Community project, was designed as a floating platform with huge cylindrical structures underneath, though the feasibility of the idea was yet to be proven. The crucial factor in overcoming this challenge was his contact with marine engineers from the United States (US) Navy. In 1964, Kikutake was invited to give a lecture at the American Institute of Architects in San Diego and observed first-hand the advances in US marine technology. This led him to reframe his approach. The revised 1968 version of Marine City sat on a platform connected by submerged cylindrical shafts (Figure 1.3). The project was further developed to commemorate the 200th anniversary of US independence. It was developed in collaboration with the University of Hawaii and the US Navy—which was ironic, considering his longtime private traumas generated by the Occupation Army. According to Kikutake, the project was agreed to by the US President Richard Nixon and the Prime Minister of Japan Kakuei Tanaka. However, despite initial optimism regarding the project, it was, to Kikutake’s deep regret, eventually canceled in the economic crises that accompanied the 1973 oil embargoes.

FIGURE 1.3 Section of Kiyonori Kikutake’s Marine City, revised version 1968. Image: public domain.

In 1975, the Marine City was finally executed at the Marine Expo in Okinawa, called Aquapolis. The floating platform was 100 m by 100 m, a quarter of the size of the plinths of Tower-Shaped Community.

3

Kisho Kurokawa, the youngest of the Metabolism members, was the most brilliant, iconic maker of capsules. Through frequent and brilliant appearances in the mass media, Kurokawa looked like a typically après-guerre figure, totally free from the dark image of the agricultural district surrounding his hometown of Nagoya, which often suffered from typhoons. In 1959, for example, the Ise Bay typhoon killed more than 5,000 people. His Agricultural City project was a direct reaction to these recurring disasters. It was designed as a platform of artificial ground, a 100 m by 100 m grid that was superimposed on a rice field and raised four meters high to allow the settlement to be safe from floods (Figure 1.4). The grid system allowed the city to grow in every direction. Like the 1963 Freie Universität Berlin project of Candillis, Josic, and Woods, it was a growing project with no final form. However, whereas the Berlin project was introverted, the Agricultural City was extroverted.

FIGURE 1.4 Digital reproduction of Kisho Kurokawa’s Agricultural City, 1960. Image: author’s collection.

The Agricultural City was based on Kurokawa’s interest in the street culture that was unique to the old settlements in Japan. The raised platform served as a frame, carrying community infrastructure in a grid of roads, water service, electricity, and a commuter monorail. The concern for the street life was shared with other Metabolists, as well as his European colleagues, Team X, whose meetings he was invited to. The interesting thing to note is that his Agricultural City was planned around a shrine-like traditional community. Having learned in a Buddhist high school, Kurokawa was never insensitive toward the habitational tradition. The model house for the farmer in the Agricultural City was crowned by a unique form of the curved roof in concrete, called a Mushroom-Shaped House. The mushroom shape had often been claimed by the ethnological and agricultural researchers in Japan as a metaphor for the self-growing nature of the traditional farmers’ houses, as well as their villages. The archetypal house was realized as the central lodge in the 1964 National Children’s Kingdom project, which was a collective work by Metabolism members.

That these projects by Kikutake and Kurokawa were a reaction to the reality of Japanese regions provided the social background for establishing the national land development plans. The Metabolism group, as well as their mentor, Kenzo Tange, were very interested in the national land development plan, which was an attempt to rehabilitate the nations that had been damaged by the war. This distinguished them from most projects of contemporary European radical architects, such as Superstudio’s The Continuous Monument of 1969, which was inspired by the scene of the flooded city of Florence three years before. However, Superstudio was concerned exclusively with the apocalyptic aspect of the disaster, not with the reality of life.

Among the Metabolism membe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: The Logic of Metabolism
• Introduction
• 1 Back from Behind the Curtain of Oblivion: Metabolism and the Postwar Actuality of Japan
• 2 The Aesthetics and/or Formalism of Change: Paradoxes and Contradictions in the Metabolist Movement
• 3 Engineering a Poetic Techno-urbanism: The Metabolists’ Visionary City in Postwar Japan
• 4 The Metabolists in Context
• 5 The Infrastructure of Care: Metabolist Architecture as a Social Catalyst
• 6 “Sunday Carpenter” Metabolism: Artificial-Land Housing and Resident Decision-Making
• 7 Maki and Dutch Team X: Step towards Group Form
• 8 Kiyonori Kikutake circa 2011: Sustaining Life through Metabolism
• 9 Metabolism as Survival Architecture
• 10 Metabolism Adventure: A Personal View
• 11 This is Your City: The Pop Future Foretold by Metabolism
• 12 Spaceship Earth: Metabolist Capsules, the Petro-economy, and Geoengineering
• 13 An Eternal Return? Considering the Temporality and Historicity of Metabolism
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index