About a month back I visited a rather unusual and eclectic museum, which included a small room at the ended dedicated to a 1980s "Utopian architecture" project called "The Tube" (die Röhre) by the German architect Günther Eckert. Eckert was a real architect who designed real buildings which actually got built in the real world, but The Tube, as far as I can tell (it's not very well documented online, it would seem, especially not in English), remained entirely a conceptual project, just a large collection of plans and sketches and mock-ups painted over photographs. Honestly I'm not sure there was ever a realistic expectation on behalf of anyone, even Eckert himself, that it would ever be more than that, rather than just a though experiment. The Tube was very unlikely to ever get build because it was, you see, a truly gigantic enclosed tube encircling the entire planet, in which of all of humanity was supposed to live and work.
This post is not about the Tube. But part of the Tube exhibit was a collage of adjacent weird conceptual architectural projects, and my eye was caught there by a few photos of something called the Nakagin Capsule Tower, built in Tokyo at the beginning of the 70s. I made a note of the name with the intent to read up on it later, and through this I learned about the Metabolism architectural movement, which s what this post *is* about.
I should say upfront that I am not really into or knowledgeable about conceptual architecture. The closest encounters I've had with it are through my readings on US 60s counter-culture hippy stuff. That scene was big into geodesic domes, heavily influenced by the charismatic Buckminster Fuller, as well as, somewhat surprisingly from the perspective of today's lasting impressions of the hippies, embracing modern wonder materials for building with. Quick, cheap, easy DIY housing for the masses was the happy touch-feely motivation behind this dalliance with tech-tech. My main window on all of this is Lloy'd Kahn (editor of the Whole Earth Catalog's "Shelter" sections), both through his famous book "Shelter", which I have a copy of, and his wonderful retrospective online work. Based on decades of personal experience designing, building and living in domes as well as collecting and distributing educational material for people wanting to do the same, Lloyd came to realise the whole high-tech time idea was "smart but not wise". If you are at all interested in this stuff, I highly recommend some of his essays on domes, one of which bears that name. Lloyd is still very much into the idea of homes where the designer(s), builder(s), owner(s) and occupant(s) are all one and the same person or group of people, but these days has a strong preference for simple, natural materials, adores wood, advocates the use of salvaged/recovered wood rather than new timber, and advocates conventional rectilinear building shapes as, surprise, actually being tremendously practical. This transition resonates with me a lot, so when I look back on high-tech modernist architectural ideas from last century it's necessarily with a kind of scepticism, but a respectful and appreciative and open-minded one that is looking for good ideas which can be "backported" to a more primitivist mindset.
Lloy'd Kahn's retrospective dome essays, fascinating reading!
The Metabolism movement was founded by a group of Japanese architects, right at the end of the 50s, and is inspired by (amongst other things, but this is the idea I find most interesting/appealing) the biological notion of continuous renewal and organic growth, and the recycling of raw materials from old structures to build new ones. This idea has deep roots in Japan. There are a number of wooden Shinto shrines, most famously the Ise Grand Shrine, which are repeatedly and continually rebuilt in a Ship of Theseus fashion. This constant rebuilding is partially religiously motivated, but it has practical benefits, too. Each cycle of renewal takes about 20 years, and it provides an opportunity for older and more experienced builders to pass on techniques and knowledge to the next generation, and ensures that there is always somebody alive who has first-hand knowledge of how and why any given aspect of the shrine as it currently stands was built, with nothing ever being lost to history. Small adaptations to the design can be made to reflect changes in the availability of materials and shifting usage practices. I think this is really very cool.
English Wikipedia article on Metabolism (architecture)
English Wikipedia article on Ise Grand Shrine
Perhaps the clearest translation of these ideals into a modern framework is the Nakagin Capsule Tower, whose photo sent me down this rabbit hole in the first place. Designed by Kisho Kurokawa, one of the founders of Metabolism, this building consisted of two towers, side by side, with a number of small "capsules", intended as office spaces or minimalist accommodation for travelling workers, quite literally plugged into each tower. The idea was that the towers, which housed staircases and the basic utility infrastructure, would be permanent parts of the building, while individual capsules could be added, removed, refurbished or modified over the years on an as-needed basis in response to changing needs. Basically something like a modular apartment building. While a nice idea in principle, this never actually happened, not even once. All 140 of the original capsules installed when the tower was first built between 1970 and 1972 remained installed without any repairs or upgrades all the way up until the tower was demolished just last year. At least one capsule was rescued for future use as a museum exhibit.
English Wikipedia article on Nakagin Capsule Tower
I don't know why the Nagakin tower didn't work out in practice like it was supposed to, whether it was an issue of practicalities, or expense, or resistance to the idea by people living and working in the tower. Maybe it's one of those ideas which looks good on paper but doesn't work out in reality, or perhaps it really would have worked out if just one or two things had been different. But I like the ideas embodied by it, and by other Metabolist projects, too. Ideas like making deconstruction and reconstruction just as easy and economical as initial construction, of allowing a building to change its form gracefully and incrementally over time in a responsive way, and of encouraging the reuse of parts of buildings or raw materials in new projects. There's not much architecture-specific about it, and you can easily translate the ideas to e.g. electronic hardware (building circuits up in a modular fashion from generic "jelly bean" logic ICs vs designing massively integrated ASICs) and no doubt software, too, although crossing the material-to-immaterial boundary probably warrants caution.
Anyway, if this is at all interesting to you, there's more to be read online, and in particular it's not hard to find a PDF scan of the out-of-print 1977 book "Metabolism in Architecture" by Kurokawa, which goes into much greater detail about the movement's history and philosophy. Incidentally, that book is increasingly characteristic of the online content which excites me most and gets most of my attention these days, which is pretty ironic. The internet was supposed to be "the information super-highway", but honestly, I rarely feel more super informed online than when I stumble upon a samizdat copy of some very specific book or magazine or article from last century exploring some largely overlooked idea or person or project which I find interesting. These artefacts are typically entirely non-interactive, mostly text, often black-and-white, sometimes quite low quality, but are nevertheless positively bursting with genuine cognitive value. They are not, generally speaking, difficult to find if you know they exist and are actively looking for them, but they are rarely well promoted, and there's rarely a sense of permanence when you do find them. They're often hosted on the kind of site which looks like it could disappear any month (though in the case of my provided link here, monoskop.org looks delightfully non-sketchy). This gives them them the feeling of precious gems and makes me want to horde them, and honestly, with the price and physical density of storage these days, why not?