![2kikutake[1]](http://biginjapan.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/2kikutake1.jpg "2kikutake[1]")
Since being imported from Greek by Thomas More for his 1516 novel, the word ‘utopia’ has carried the ambiguous duel meaning of ‘good place’ (eu + topia) and ‘no place’ (ou + topia), suggesting a place of goodness that doesn’t exist in any place beyond the realm of fiction. It entails the pursuit of an imagined ideal state as well as criticism of present reality.
An upcoming exhibition at Mori Museum in Tokyo, Metabolism, The City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan looks back at the utopian urbanism of the 1960s Metabolist movement. Launched by an industrial designer, a graphic designer, a critic and four young architects, Metabolism was a response to, among other things, the housing crises in postwar Japanese cities. Distributed in 1960 at the World Design Conference in Tokyo, their manifesto outlined a new urbanism that would lead to new social order.
Fuelled by the imaginative optimism of the early 1960s, the movement’s founding avant-garde technocrats conceived of future cities as living organisms that would be mobile, adaptable and renewable, as per the metabolic processes in the organic world. They proposed vertical urbanism with entire cities in towers, and envisioned the sea and the sky as viable future sites for human inhabitancy. The most famous Metabolist building is Kisho Kurokawa’s ill-fated Nakagin Capsule Tower Building, which was the world’s first large-scale modular structure.
They are often compared to the London-based futurist group Archigram who were proposing hypothetical flexible urbanism and plug-in megastructures, around the same time. But the Metabolists’ futurism was from the beginning borrowing heavily from the past, and they often brought up aspects of Japan’s architectural history that coincided with their emphasis on material impermanence and regeneration – such as the Ise Grand Shrine that has been completely dismantled, burnt and rebuilt from scratch every twenty years for over a millennium.
Until recent years the movement has remained conspicuously under-documented in English. But growing interest is indicated by this new book published last year and this upcoming publication from architect Rem Koolhaas and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as Mori Museum’s major exhibition. The first comprehensive overview of the movement, the show will feature models, drawings, photos and archival footage alongside a detached capsule from the Nakagin Tower.
Metabolism, the City of the Future is promising to not only document the past but to speak to the present – a symposium is programmed for the opening weekend in September, with a discussion between the surviving original Metabolists Kenji Ekuan, Koji Kamiya, Kiyonori Kikutake and Fumihiko Maki, as well as a talk on Metabolism as Politics with Rem Koolhaas, Azuma Hiroki (writer, cultural critic), Mikuriya Takashi (Processor, Research Center of Advanced Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo) and Nader Vossoughian (curator, urban theorist).
I will be reporting from there in September, and from the coinciding The 24th World Congress of Architecture.
Images from top:
Models by Kikutake Kiyonori, including ‘Marine City’ 1963
Nakagin Capsule Tower Building, 2010, photo by Amelia Groom
Restorative Investigation of a Plan for Tokyo-1960- 2008. CG: UPG.@S.I.T
Tange Kenzo, Yamanashi Culture Hall, 1966, photo by Shinkenchiku-sha