Incubated cities are destined to self-destruct
Ruins are the style of our future cities
Future cities are themselves ruins
Our contemporary cities, for this reason,
are destined to live only a fleeting moment
Give up their energy and return to inert material
All our proposals and efforts will be buried
And once again the incubation mechanism is reconstituted
That will be the future
On show at the new Misa Shin Gallery in Tokyo until the end of this month are early works by Arata Isozaki, including a series of etchings, his Incubation Process model of Tokyo (1962) (below), and a large-scale silkscreen print of his Re-ruined Hiroshima (1968) (above). Also on the wall in the first image below is the model of the inflatable concert hall he is currently working on with Anish Kapoor for Tohoku.
My two previous posts were about Isozaki’s compulsive fascination with destruction and decay. In the early 1960s he had pictured layered cities with platforms for living suspended above classical ruins and highways weaving between crumbling Doric columns. When Incubation Process was shown in the 1962 Metabolism exhibition This Will Be Your City, it was captioned with the less-than-utopian poem cited above. He was weary of the Metabolists’ optimism about the future and recalls (in an interview with Rem Koolhaas in his new book Project Japan), “they had no skepticism towards their utopia; they represented only a form of progressivism.”
Also in 1962, Isozaki published his infamous text City Demolition Industry, Inc. in Japan Architect magazine, where he constructed a schizophrenic split between being a city planner/architect, and being a killer. The article (which is reprinted in Project Japan, where Koolhaas comments that he considers it one of the most interesting texts ever written by an architect) is an enigmatic rumination on the running theme that “construction in its full sense is always destruction as well” (Isozaki, ‘On Ruins’).
Images ©MISA SHIN GALLERY