Nicolai Ouroussoff's
Future Vision Banished to the Past laments the pending loss of Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower. Recognized by its inhabitants as being 'squalid' and 'cramped' they voted to demoish it and start over. While this would be the erasure of a key example of one of the few realized and even fewer extant examples of the Japanese Metablolist stlyle, its preservation would go against the very tenants of the style's own making.
Introduced at the World Design Conference in Tokyo in 1960, by the Japanese Architects Kenzo Tange, Kisho Kurokawa, and Kiyonoru Kikutake, this style was intended to create structures that were
thought of as a tree- a permanent element, with the dwelling units as leaves- temporary elements which fall down and are renewd according to the needs of the moment. The buildings can grow within this structure and die and grow again- but the structure remains The structure within Kurokawa's tree is not the problem- but the leaves themselves. Outmoded, these machines for living hang on. Contrary to the Metabloist mantra, they were never regenerated. They are all in their autumnal state with no new buds to take their place.
Ideally Toyota or another local company would come along with 'this years model' and allow the movement to realize its intent of guided rebirth. It could even be a yearly design competition in the way that their wildly popular Uniqlo commands hundreds of entries from around the country for its t-shirt designs every year. Had this ocurred periodically throughout its 37 years of existence, Japan would have a lovely ecclectic monument to their technological advances, architectural integrity and megastructure sensibility all in one. It would also provide legitimacy to the
original Metabolist claims.
This vertical "used car lot" could perhaps allow one original unit to remain intact as a testament to the movement- a control unit to measure this scientific, social and techological experiment against. With so many still intact this vision is still possible in ways America has missed out on (of the hundreds of homes built in Levittown, NY as the last published inventory, only TWO remained unaltered from their original states).
As Ouroussoff explains,
In theory, more capsules could be plugged-in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan's technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker.But resistence against change, and the impractical nature of replacement modules has left this building static, and unable to achieve the flexibility its creation strove to realize. The author's very acknowledgement that nobody has "stepped up with a viable plan for how to save it" is ironic in that its salvation is in own leprosy and regeneration. It by its very existence was meant to shed its parts to the technological trash heap and be rebuilt. What would ever be expected to remain is the "permanent"- the armature holding the units- a skeleton never recognized as the organizing factor and impractical out of the context of its functional living-pod "ornaments".
The Japanese claiming ownership for Metablosim is akin to the Modernists hijacking their term from future use in the discipline and even Rudolph taking credit for the Sarasota or Regional Style. Forever linking Regionalism to Florida, the style negates its potential for ubiquity based upon design responsive to the climate and context. Similarly the Japanese were not the only ones to pursue Metabolism.
While Rudolph was known to be a Regonalist, a Brutalist, a Late Modernist, or, if like other blogs you read and quote the mis-informed
Wikipedia page, he's apparently also a "cubist".
Regardless, the Japanese Metabloist in him is also present. His figuration of the Buffalo Waterfront (image Left), although never fully realized, was a massive expansion of the city into the water, similar to Kenzo Tange's progressive, and aggressive proposal for Tokyo.
Perhaps his most famous Metabolist-like proposals are for the Lower Manhattan Expressway aka LoMEx (image Below) and the Graphic Arts Center (image Left). Both of these proposals were mega-structures which straddled the city beneath. By building structures where buildings weren't suppsed to go i.e. on the grid lines themselves and not within the grid, Rudolph created serpantine armatures to install his prefabricated "20th Century Brick"s of moudlar houses. Growing, aggregating and reorganizing, these proposals were largely D.O.A. but provide a fantastic insight to the further densification of the city, one perhaps future generations will come to realize.
In viewing these one cannot help but recall Kenzo Tange's design studio at Harvard when he brought Metabolism to Massachusetts (image Below).
The similarities are more than coincidence. If Tange's proposal were built, it would have transformed the Harbor and extended the valuable waterfront views to the masses.
If Rudolph's got built, they would perhaps be his most recognizable structures, and the most protected from deomolition as by their very construction, they would call for reorganization and constant change. A preservation via evolution.
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