"Metabolism: City in the Future": MORI ART MUSEUM.
Matsui, Midori
This exhibition is the first ever to provide a comprehensive
overview of Metabolism, the internationally acclaimed Japanese
avant-garde architectural movement of the 1960s. With a spectacular
installation of more than five hundred objects and documents
representing some eighty projects, it provides plural contexts for
interpreting the movement. The exhibition's main thesis is that
Metabolism inherited the "nation-building" spirit from prewar
land-development projects and postwar reconstruction plans for Japanese
cities, including Kenzo Tange and others' master plan for Hiroshima
and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 1955. This primarily suggests
Metabolism's renewed relevance for the restoration of Japanese
national life after the Tohoku earthquake of last March, though the
generous showing of primary materials also offers many alternative ways
of understanding Metabolism's contemporary significance.
Metabolism, formed by seven members--critic Noboru Kawazoe;
architects Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, Masato Otaka, and Fumihiko
Maki; industrial designer Kenji Ekuan; and graphic designer Kiyoshi
Awazu--was launched on the occasion of the World Design Conference in
Tokyo in May 1960 with the aim of redefining architecture as a means to
construct a new urban space. In "Metabolism/1960," the
manifesto distributed at the conference, the seven announced their
purposes specifically as (1) to provide a vision of a future society,
(2) to treat design and technology as extensions of the generative power
of human life--as part of the universal process of becoming, and (3) to
promote the "metabolic transformation of history." In the same
manifesto, the architects presented their urbanist plans. Kikutake gave
details of architectural projects such as Tower Shape Community, 1958,
presenting the basic Metabolist architectural model that combines a core
structure (often called a megastructure)--in this case, a gigantic
pillar--with movable units that could be added or taken away to expand
or condense the city. He also showed its minimum embodiment in Sky House
(Kikutake's own one-room dwelling, built in 1958) and his proposal
for "Movenets," raised high above the irregular ground with
pillars. Kurokawa presented Agricultural City Project, 1960, in which
clusters of built structures hover over agricultural areas; Maki and
Otaka's collaborative project for the redevelopment of the Shinjuku
Terminal train station led to their proposal "Toward Group
Form" (1960), which envisaged urban development through the
flexible relations of loosely grouped buildings.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
From the original members' drawings, statements, architectural
plans, and models, one can infer the progressive nature of
Metabolism's ideas and methods. They embraced mutability as a
conceptual principle, assuming both architecture and cities could
coalesce and dissipate like living organisms; the accumulation of
cell-like units represented by Kikutake's housing projects and
Kurokawa's capsule buildings, and the organic development of Maki
and Otaka's group buildings reflect the city's growth out of
people's activities, defying modernist architecture's symbolic
monumentality, and suggest that the architectural design is determined
by use, not by the architect's ideal or aesthetic taste. The
apparently futuristic look of Metabolist architecture was a by-product
of the practical demands of the postindustrial city, as in
Kikutake's Marine City, 1963, an autonomous community on the sea
combining collective housing and urban facilities, which was envisioned
as a solution to population growth; and in the elevation of
Kurokawa's Agricultural City over rice paddies, in order to
minimize damage from natural disasters like typhoons.
Metabolism's conceptual and formal affinity with contemporary
European avant-garde architectural movements is evident: The spirit of
drift and nomadism of Marine City is also apparent in Walking City,
1964, by Archigram member Ron Herron. The emphasis of another Archigram
collaborator, Warren Chalk, on the user's creativity and conception
of architecture as a nexus of situations--as well as Guy Debord's
claim that unitary urbanism could be realized through the force fields
formed by people's activities rather than conventional aesthetics
and functions--resonates with the Metabolists' flexibility,
pragmatism, and fundamental focus on human life. Above all, however,
Metabolism's proposals provoke us to imagine new forms for living.
