Metabolism (architecture)
Some smaller, individual buildings that employed the principles of Metabolism were built and these included Tange's Yamanashi Press and Broadcaster Centre and Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower.
The greatest concentration of their work was to be found at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka where Tange was responsible for master planning the whole site whilst Kikutake and Kurokawa designed pavilions.
The Team 10 architects introduced concepts like "human association", "cluster" and "mobility", with Bakema encouraging the combination of architecture and planning in urban design.
As Tange had just accepted an invitation to be a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology he recommended his junior colleague Takashi Asada to replace him in the organisation of the conference programmes.
[11] The young Asada invited two friends to help him: the architectural critic and former editor of the magazine Shinkenchiku, Noboru Kawazoe, and Kisho Kurokawa who was one of Tange's students.
Ekuan was asked because of his recent participation in a seminar given by Konrad Wachsmann[13] (he arrived at the lecture on a YA-1 motorbike that he had newly designed for Yamaha)[14] and Otaka was a junior associate of Kunio Maekawa and had just completed the Harumi Apartment Building in Tokyo Bay.
[17] The group also searched for architectural solutions to Japan's phenomenal urban expansion brought about by its economic growth and how this could be reconciled with its shortage of usable land.
They were inspired by examples of circular growth and renewal found in traditional Japanese architecture like the Ise Shrine and Katsura Detached Palace.
[19] The conference ran from 11–16 May 1960 and had 227 guests, 84 of whom were international, including the architects Louis Kahn, Ralph Erskine, B. V. Doshi, Jean Prouvé, Paul Rudolph and Peter and Alison Smithson.
The Japanese meaning of the word has a feeling of replacement of the old with the new and the group further interpreted this to be equivalent to the continuous renewal and organic growth of the city.
[26] Some of the projects included in the manifesto were subsequently displayed at the Museum of Modern Art's 1960 exhibition entitled Visionary Architecture and exposed the Japanese architects' work to a much wider international audience.
[39] Otaka had first thought about the relationship between infrastructure and architecture in his 1949 graduation thesis and he continued to explore ideas about "artificial ground" during his work at Maekawa's office.
[43] The design was for a linear city that used a series of nine-kilometre modules that stretched 80 km across Tokyo Bay from Ikebukuro in the north west to Kisarazu in the south east.
The perimeter of each of the modules was organised into three levels of looping highways, as Tange was adamant that an efficient communication system would be the key to modern living.
Residential areas were to be accommodated on parallel streets that ran perpendicular to the main linear axis and people would build their own houses within giant A-frame structures.
As well as two news firms and a printing company the building needed to incorporate a cafeteria and shops at ground floor level to interface with the adjoining city.
He stacked these functions vertically according to need, for example, the printing plant is on the ground floor to facilitate access to the street for loading and transportation.
He then took all the service functions including elevators, toilets and pipes and grouped them into 16 reinforced concrete cylindrical towers, each with an equal 5 metre diameter.
The units originally contained a bed, storage cabinets, a bathroom, a colour television set, clock, refrigerator and air conditioner, although optional extras such as a stereo were available.
[55] As of 2017, many capsules had been renovated and were being used as residential and office spaces, while short-stay renting such as Airbnb or other lodging provisions had been banned by the administration of the building.
It includes residential, office and cultural buildings as well as the Royal Danish Embassy and is situated on both sides of Kyū-Yamate avenue in the Daikanyama district of Tokyo.
Initially the group had chosen the name Burnt Ash School to reflect the ruined state of firebombed Japanese cities and the opportunity they presented for radical re-building.
[61] Although Metabolism rejected visual references from the past,[62] they embraced concepts of prefabrication and renewal from traditional Japanese architecture, especially the twenty-year cycle of the rebuilding of the Ise Shrine (to which Tange and Kawazoe were invited in 1953).
[64] Maki would later criticise the Megastructure approach to design advocating instead his idea of Group Form which he thought would better accommodate the disorder of the city.
[67] He also asked Ekuan to oversee the design of the furniture and transportation and Kawazoe to curate the Mid-Air Exhibition which was sited in the huge space-frame roof.
Kawaguchi invented a welding-free ball joint to safely distribute the load and worked out a method of assembling the frame on the ground before raising it using jacks.
[68] But even before Japan's period of rapid economic growth ended with the world energy crisis, critics were calling the Expo a dystopia that was removed from reality.
[76] The energy crisis demonstrated Japan's reliance both on imported oil and led to a re-evaluation of design and planning with architects moving away from utopian projects towards smaller urban interventions.
[80][81] Kurokawa's work included a competition win for Abu Dhabi's National Theatre (1977), capsule-tower designs for a hotel in Baghdad (1975) and a city in the desert in Libya (1979–1984).
The 100 x 100 meter floating city block contained accommodation that included a banquet hall, offices and residences for 40 staff and it was built in Hiroshima and then towed to Okinawa.
