Metabolism

Architects and city planners in 1959 Kisho kurokawa is one of the founder of the Metabolism.

Designs relied heavily on advanced technology, and they often consist of adaptable plug-in mega

structures.

“Changeability and Flexibility were the key elements that the Metabolism Group Seized upon

and explored. Metabolism, as we know it, is the biological process by which life is maintained

through the continuous cycle of producing and destroying protoplasm. To the Japanese architects

who adopted the name, it meant creating a dynamic environment that could live and grow by

discarding its outdated parts and regenerating newer, more viable elements”. To develop a

building system that “could cope with the problems of our rapidly changing society, and at the

same time maintain stabilized human lives”

Metabolist Movement

In the late 1950s a small group of young Japanese architects and designers joined forces under

the title of "Metabolism". Their visions for cities of the future inhabited by a mass society were

characterized by large scale, flexible, and expandable structures that evoked the processes of

organic growth. Their concept of change and the related nature analogies were visible anyway

but in order to manifest this as a principle, the group thought it needed a universal concept and a

method. One, which was thoroughly Japanese and at the same time internationally practicable.

They needed a name for their group that made a statement. They wanted a name that included

“change” against the eternal and absolute of the western society; also something including

biological means like “growth,” “flow” and “Nature,” as well as overall principals of life such as

“renewal” and “exchange.” So Mr. Kikutake looked into the dictionary and found the word

“Metabolism” They all agreed on this word, with the ending “-ism,” it sounded like the

expression of the principals of their new movement. In their view, the traditional laws of fixed

form and function were obsolete. Metabolism arose in post-World War II Japan, and so much of

the work produced by the movement is primarily concerned with housing issues.

The group's work is often called technocratic and their designs are described as avant-garde with

a rhetorical character. The work of the Metabolists has often been compared to the unbuilt

designs of Archigram.

After the disbanding of CIAM in 1958, the ideas of Team X were of great influence to young

architects around the globe, including young Japanese architects. The World Design Conference

of 1960 was held in Japan, and a group of young Japanese architects were involved with the

planning. Under the guidance of Kenzo Tange, the architects Takashi Asada, Kisho

Kurokawa, Kiyonori Kikutake, and writer Noboru Kawazoe often met and discussed the

direction of Japanese architecture and urbanism. During the World Design Conference, the

Metabolist group presented their first declaration as a bilingual pamphlet called Metabolism

1960: The proposals for a New Urbanism. Contributors to this work were Noboru

Kawazoe, Kiyonori Kikutake, Fumihiko Maki, Masato Otaka, Kisho Kurokawa, and Kiyoshi

Awazu. There are four copies of this pamphlet in libraries around the world; in the United States,

one copy is found at Harvard University and one in the rare books collection of the College of

Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. The ideas of Metabolism as

implemented in modern culture were philosophical as well as architectural, and ostensibly based

on Buddhist notions of impermanence and change.

The individual members of the group soon went their own way and their contributions to

the Osaka Exposition of 1970 can be seen as their last major work.

Metabolist designs relied heavily on advanced technology, and they often consist of adaptable

plug-in mega structures. Famous projects included the floating city in the sea (Unabara project),

Kiyonori Kikutake's Marine City, Tower City, Ocean City, Wall City, Kisho Kurokawa's

Agricultural City and Helix City. The most famous built example of Metabolism is

Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972).