Japanese Design Metabolism and Contemporary Tokyo

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25 3The Japanese Were Never Modern

Tokyo Data Flows,

Infrastructure

Despite efforts by the Japanese

government to decentralize the

economy and population

outside of Tokyo since the

1950s, it contains a viral urban-ism set to ‘automatic replicate’.

This urban predicament involv-

ing the scale, density and future

growth of Tokyo became the

focus of a group of architects in

the 1960s that called their

movement Metabolism. The

name placed emphasis upon

living systems and processesthat then became the basis for

generating design models.

When taken in combination

with the nonmonumental

sensibility of the cultural prod-

ucts of Japan that favor ephem-

erality over permanence, the

Japanese do not fit squarely into

Western architectural moder-nity. Nevertheless, this infiltra-

tion of life sciences into archi-

tectural thinking was one of the

first cases of an ecological

design model. The organicism

to be found in Japanese archi-

tecture that had mesmerized

Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruno

Taut is perhaps what had firstpointed the Metabolists

towards ecological design. This,

in conjunction with rebuilding

after the Atomic bomb,

propelled an enduring ecologi-

cal orientation that deserves

further attention.

Metabolist ideas were

first published in the manifesto“Metabolism 1960,” which was

sold at the entrance of the 1960

World Design Conference in

Tokyo (WoDeCo). The

Architectureand Urbanism

The JapaneseWere NeverModern:

Metabolism’sSupra-Modernity

Sarah Stanley



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emergence of Metabolism happened amidst a flood of mechani-

cal inventions in Japan (pocket transistor radios [1951], Suzukilightweight cars [1955], Fujitsu Computers [1956], Tokaido

Shinkansen bullet trains [1964] and fiber-optic communications

[1963]). In this small press publication architecture follows the

logic of high-speed rail, radio broadcast transmissions (“brain-

wave receivers”) and industrial floating cities. The basic problem

of living environments and the home were folded into overarch-

ing concerns with urban mobilities. What was categorized as

“move-nets,” from movable appliance systems within houses to

movable city blocks, were actually a type of hardware that coulddouble as urban infrastructure. The capsule towers that

contained interchangeable, industrially produced living units

epitomize these ideas. Kisho Kurokawa succeeded in manufac-

turing the capsule units and built two towers, one in Tokyo and

󟿽

Page fromMetabolism1960. Image from+ACNE.





the other in Osaka. The compact, efficient organization of the

living unit was informed by the research done by NASA regard-

ing bodily efficiency when operating control panels. In 1972,

after Japan had emerged as a major manufacturer and exporter

of automobiles, each capsule unit was designed to be manufac-

tured at the same price as a Toyota, and each was fitted with a

radio, telephone and reel-to-reel tape deck. The capsules, preced-ing the personal computer, were defined by the idea that a

person could be ‘plugged in’ to their communication apparatus

at all times.

The key to Metabolist thinking was the mapping of

biological design models onto urban growth to produce a

networked informational system. For these architects, architec-

ture was no longer a singular building but a much vaster region

that could stretch out along the length of Japan, or could form a

network of spine-like bridges over the Bay of Tokyo. Many ofthe models generated by Metabolism function as a type of scaf-

folding that could hold the various components, resembling an

animal or plant’s cellular partitions. If organic life depends

upon the need to consume, process and store energy, these

processes also describe the inputting, storage and retrieval of an

informational archive. Following from this emphasis, the city of

Tokyo was studied through socio-economic data collected,

examined and relayed into design methodologies. This meant

that urban architectural sites had to be designed at the scale ofinfrastructure. The technical system capable of organizing

urban living conditions, including informational ones, was the

megastructure. The idea of superstructures had been pervasive

in modernist visions for a newly electrified city, such as Soviet

constructivist El Lissitsky’s horizontal skyscrapers. Arata Isosa-

ki’s contribution of office buildings for Tange’s Plan for Tokyo

1960 use massive slabs suspended between joint core structures

across the Bay of Tokyo, which Isosaki continued to use for other

master planning projects in Shinjuku and Shibuya. FumihikoMaki’s Golgi Structures also spread fan-like in linked clusters

above the existing urban infrastructure [1968]. Megastructures,

and the practice of large-scale master planning, are derived from

the aerial perspective associated with the imagery of aerial

bombardment. In fact, Metabolist megastructures first appear in

a photomontage that shows a tangle of architectural mutations

resembling metallic tumbleweed that drift over a nuclear land-

scape. In other ways, the idea of megastructures were practical

in one of the world’s most seismically active areas, prone toearthquakes, fires and flooding. It is within these ephemeral

conditions that the Japanese first began to build in far shorter

cycles than other countries (26 years against the 44 in the USA

and 75 in the UK).



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As the largest metropolitan area in the world (35

million), Tokyo expands by eating itself: sliver-thin subdivisions

cut from larger plots in low-rise areas. Despite its rapid, inten-

sive growth, Tokyo is still today a low- to mid-rise city compared

with other capitalist global cities in Asia, such as Taiwan, Hong

Kong or Singapore. The problem with suburban sprawl in

Tokyo is the long commuting times for those who live in areas

farthest from central business districts, most often those with

lower incomes. This has led to a condition of intensive concen-tration of the working population located in an urban belt on

the Eastern coast that joins Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka. Kenzo

Tange announced his Tokaido Megalopolis plan in 1964 that

made the Tokyo-Osaka continuum into a single massive city,

which was then refined in 1971 as “21st Century Japan— A Vision

of the Future on National Land and Living”. Tange’s graphic

atlas processed statistical data gathered from throughout Japan

so that informatics was coupled with emphasis placed by the

government on the development of urban and regional infra-structure. This is a transitional period for Japanese architects as

they begin to integrate their designs with regional planning, a

research emphasis later adapted in the 1990s by European archi-

tecture offices like Rem Koolhaas/OMA and later by MVRDV,




Dutch architects also beset with concerns about density and

intensive urbanization. This approach provided a strong impe-

tus for an architecture that can integrate urbanism rather than

focus only upon institutional, private or corporate programs.

Japanese Metabolism’s Alternative Modernities

The main tenets of Metabolism were first presented as a graphic

exercise, ones that drew upon technical science imaging of mass

media, a design trend in the 1950s also found in exhibitionsorganized by Gyorgy Kepes at MIT. (Tange taught at MIT in

1959). Crick and Watson’s double-helix diagrams of the DNA in

1953, as one example, were then incorporated into Kurokawa’s

Helix City Tokyo (1961). However, this engagement with images

does not automatically turn design into aesthetics as architec-

tural historians often diagnose it.1 It may be that the emergence

of design science stole back the creation of images from aesthet-

ics through a focus upon patterning that

emphasized flows of energy and informa-tion. Metabolist design methodologies

were searching for more complex model

through diagrammatic rather than static

images. The Metabolist discussion of

1 • Reinhold Martin considers the Geode-sic dome to be a collapsing of art andscience in “Crystal Balls,” Any 17 [ForgetFuller?], 1997: 35. Mark Wigley calls theuse of pattern “an aesthetic criterion” in“Planetary Homeboy,” Any 17: 19.

󟿽Plan for Tokyo,1960. Model.Kenzo Tange.



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processing systems also became their strategy for promotion.

International in outlook from the beginning, Japanese archi-

tects’ unique contributions were made known through the stag-

ing of interactions with international groups, both by traveling

to CIAM meetings and by inviting these international groups

and design figures to design events in Tokyo (Expo 70, WoDeCo

60). Japanese Metabolists made use of media, similar to Archi-gram’s emphasis on graphic communication, such as small print

publications, allowing the machinic morphologies that inhabit

the designs to be maximized through the dissemination of

information. This engagement with media networks points to

yet another layer of storage and retrieval systems built into the

Metabolist informational archive.

Commentators often imply that modern architecture

was invented in Europe and America and transferred to places

like Japan. Yet, the Japanese may have outpaced Western moder-nity through advanced technologies, especially through cinema

and animation, without any need to topple historical memory

and the monument.2 While the Italian architects of Superstudio

took an ironical approach to city planning by proposing monu-

ments that covered over the entire city, as a criticism of architec-

ture as a monumental edifice, it becomes clear that classical

monumentality never shaped architectural modernity in Japan.

A few of the Metabolist architects, and the generation prior, did

study, work or teach with icons of the Modern movement, suchas Fumihiko Maki with Josep Sert and Walter Gropius at

Harvard. Despite this, according to Maki’s own accounts, his

contributions to Metabolism stem from a two-year research tour

through Asia, Europe and the Middle-East, the period he had

first developed the use of Golgi structures for high-rise towers.

Likewise, Maki’s concept of the ‘genetic’ emerged from an inten-

sive scrutiny of vernacular architectures, which were analyzed as

urban topographies in relation to climate.

The standardized structures produced by industrialprefabrication were already present in much of Japanese archi-

tecture, such as prefabricated wood components used to build

Japanese houses along with the “Six-Mat Room,” which denotes

a standardized measuring system for houses, both from the

sixteenth century. The tatami itself is the size of an average

height of a person while lying down, exhibiting a very early

effort to standardize architectural components tailored to the

human body. Furthermore, a schematic drawing that presents

the long, intersecting wooden enclosures that define the Japa-nese temple or shrine complex describes Mies van der Rohe’s

concept of the generic, long before the

architect used the term to describe a

modern architecture without features.2 • Trond Lundemo, “Tokyo and theMonument,” SITE 7–8, 2004.





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Plan for Tokyo, 1960. Details of the model. Kenzo Tange.




1961, characterized by the repetition of rounded tentacles

painted with circular dots, which are inserted into chairs or

mirrored rooms (Endless Love Room, 1964). The omnidirec-

tional mirroring achieves a vertiginous melting of the boundar-

ies between body and environment, so that the entire cosmos is

vibrating through this turning inside out of embodiment. In

order to engage the invisible, the life or spirit of things must bereanimated on a continual basis. What is found in every small

corner of contemporary Tokyo is the prescribed habits or

gestures upon entering a Shinto and Buddhist shrine, such as

washing at the fountain, ringing the gong at the entrance,

clapping the hands, bowing; all this is executed as quickly as

consuming a bowl of Udon.

Nuclear Modernity

In post-Atomic Hiroshima the founder of Japanese MetabolismKenzo Tange was brought in soon after the blast to begin to plan

a new city. Tange eventually won the competition to build the

Hiroshima Peace Memorial, his first design commission, an

iconic modernist building located at ground zero completed in

1955. Tange’s Peace Memorial makes a cameo appearance while

under construction by an all-women crew in the film Children of

the Atom Bomb (Kaneto Shindo, 1952), the first film allowed to

depict Hiroshima and its destruction by the Atom bomb.

Images of ecological devastation, including burning trees, plantsand wildlife are reoccurring. One sequence follows two young

boys who work as shoe shiners running through the war-torn

city. The mother is working with primitive tools as her young

son runs up the stairs of the memorial because the father is now

finally dying of radiation sickness. The dust and steady hammer-

ing noise rising from the raw concrete building lends to the

scene’s misery. In the next shot, the family mourns the loss of

the patriarch in a diminutive wooden house, an austere contrast

to the overbearing monumentality of the Peace Memorial. Thecinematic climax of this scene exposes something of the rela-

tions between modern architecture and the destruction wrought

by atomic warfare. The memorial succeeded in creating an artil-

lery for remembering, a site that instantly became global in

orientation, appearing in several movies, including Alain

Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), and eventually becoming

one of the centers for the anti-nuclear movement.

In relief exposure, Japan’s nuclear power industry was

launched during the same period as the emergence of Metabo-lism. It was rationalized at the time as necessary due to

destroyed thermal generators, grids and transformers in urban

areas during the war. It seems unlikely that a country that had

been devastated by the Atom bomb would so readily accept




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nuclear power, alongside the obvious risks due to earthquakesand tsunami. Tetsuo Arima, a professor of media studies at

Tokyo’s Waseda University, studied declassified documents on

postwar relations to establish links between the CIA and media

outlets in Japan.6 Among the CIA’s Japanese allies in the propa-

ganda effort was Matsutaro Shoriki, owner of the Yomiuri news-

paper, the world’s largest, and Nippon Television, Japan’s first

commercial TV station, who published a series of pro-nuclear

articles starting in January 1954 and aired Disney’s Our Friend the

Atom (1953). Alongside the emergence of Japanese Metabolism,in many ways an ecological response to

the devastation and death caused by the

Atom bomb, was a nuclear power indus-

try that was planning facilities in

󟿽Plan for Tokyo,1960. Systempiles and nuclei.Kenzo Tange.

6 • Tetsuo Arima, Nuclear Power, Shoriki

and the CIA (Tokyo: Shinchosha 2008).




risk-prone earthquake and tsunami zones. Tange’s Peace Memo-

rial has become yet again the focus of the anti-nuclear move-

ment, with protests planned regularly in Hiroshima, Tokyo and

elsewhere in Japan.

Metabolism in Contemporary Tokyo

The members of Metabolism do not so readily distinguishaesthetic matters from other philosophical, technological or

scientific categories or even more practical dimensions of living.

Consequently, the Metabolists chose to design in relation to

large-scale infrastructure in ways that merged the practical with

the fantastic. The kernel of the idea for an unbroken landscape

between streetscape and building is found when city blocks and

walkways climb up the sloping side of a building’s roof (Kuro-

kawa, Wall City, 1959). Today this has become a common design

strategy, found in the undulating surfaces of the YokohamaInternational Port Terminal. Both Kurokawa and Tange at vari-

ous times proposed huge A-frame roofs that provided ecological

advantages of ventilation slots and shade that were eventually

realized in Singapore by students of Metabolist architects.7

Even if realized projects never can measure up to the ambitions

that take shape in conceptual renderings and models, it is one of

the most important methods that architects have to generate

new models for design. When examining the entire spectrum of

the Metabolist projects, many of the design projects worked outthrough various media, yet never formally realized, may have

found openings in the planning and construction of Tokyo. By

the early 1970s building and construction was largely taken over

by multinational corporate entities responsible for building

Tokyo’s infrastructure.8 Preceding this period, Japanese Metabo-

lists had been commissioned by the government throughout the

1960s to produce multi-billion yen urban planning studies that

were then ostensively handed off to an advanced building indus-

try, one that contributes 17.9% of Japan’s GDP (higher than theUnited States and Europe combined).9 A concrete example of

this is Tange and Kurokawa’s separate proposals for an urban

core to extend between Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka taken up by

the end of the 1980s using “Maglev” 500 kilometer per hour train

lines and the eventual adhoc land reclamation of Tokyo Bay.

One way Tokyo’s architecture

might be described is “real modernism”.

If in the areas of Roppongi, Ginza and

Shibuya exclusive brands producedesigner architectures that appear in

every other luxury shopping district

worldwide, the majority of Tokyo resem-

bles more the computer game Tetris,

7 • OMA/AMO, Project Japan (Koln: TASCHEN2011), 608.8 • Ibid, 603.9 • Livio Sacchi, Tokyo: City and Architecture (Milan: Skira Editore S.p.A, 2004), 69.




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where any piece can be plucked out and replaced by any other.

What may be the actual legacy of Metabolist thinking is the

detachable and interchangeable building parts that can besnapped into place, newly fitted and changed as warranted by

wear. For instance, perhaps due to the temperate climate, stair-

wells and movement corridors are often built as separate

modules outside many mid-rise buildings; some of these

emerged from Metabolist prototypes. Consequently any assess-

ment of the impact of Metabolism should not be based upon the

percentage of any individual architect’s built projects based on

interviews with Metabolists today. Many of the group’s propos-

als took shape in the infrastructure of Tokyo, a city that hasproduced the greatest number of bridges, viaducts and tunnels

per unit of distance in the world.

It is as if the building of megastructures above the city,

as the Metabolists had envisioned, became the spiraling multi-

level networks found today in Tokyo. It becomes clear almost

immediately that it is food and drinking establishments that

organize these urban transport passageways below ground. “To

cross the city (or to penetrate its depth, for underground there

are whole networks of bars, shops towhich you sometimes gain access by a

simple entryway…)”10 Every sweet, sour,

hard or crunchy snack or condiment,

dried or fresh fish, what seems like miles

󟿽China CentralTelevision (CCTV),designed by RemKoolhaas (OMA).Image from CCTV.

10 • Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (NewYork: Hill and Wang, 1982), 39.




11 • Ibid, 11—15.12 • Ibid, 39.

of it, line these underground networks. Tokyo’s urban metabo-

lism is therefore connected with the deep Japanese sensibility

regarding alimentary processes, ones that often evoke design.

Naming this the Twilight of the Raw, Roland Barthes writes an

hermeneutical exegesis of Japanese cooking and eating: “the

cucumber’s future is not its accumulation or its thickening, but

its division.” and “the foodstuff has for its envelope nothing buttime.”11 These underground corridors with multiple levels

connect up with train stations, retail shopping of all varieties,

service centers and above ground office complexes. All these are

combined through multi-level platforms that weave into build-

ings several stories above street level. This multidirectionality is

displayed as a series of overhead signs that list 50 to 100 names

at informational checkpoints to direct circulation provided by

escalators, elevators and people movers. All of these flows

congregate around the station as the ‘empty center’ that Barthesclaimed shares a kinship with the imperial ring: “Thus each

district is collected in the void of its station.”12 This hyperinfor-

matic way finding continues even into the multi-storied depart-

ment stores. For instance, Labi’s numerous locations exhibit

floor plans with the same superimposition of maps and infor-

mation that is liable to induce vertigo in a visitor— the station

level maze of signage is continued through color-coded lines on

the floor that point to a product’s location.

Coda: OMA’s Project Japan and Mori Art Museum’s

Metabolism, City of the Future (2011)

The importance of design in this potent mix of architecture,

urbanism, information systems and ecology happens on several

levels. Metabolism has reemerged now for some of the same

reasons that Buckminster Fuller’s models were pulled from the

archive and placed back onto museum tables beginning in the

1990s. The Mori Art Museum’s 2011 exhibition about Metabo-

lism opened around the same time the OMA research projectwas released as Project Japan, a book compilation about Metabo-

lism including interviews with its members. Although both the

Mori show and Project Japan were planned well in advance of the

Fukushima disaster of March 2011, it nevertheless forms the

backdrop for both the venue and the book about Metabolism.

The Fukushima disaster lent additional weight to the Mori Art

Museum’s entrance galleries containing the first Metabolist

projects in response to Hiroshima-Nagasaki. Likewise, the

ecological devastation increases the urgency for an ecologicaldesign approach explored by the Metabolists.

OMA’s Project Japan follows the discourse networks

that enabled Japanese architects, loosely gathered as members of

Metabolism, to gain international prominence. The Mori Art




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Museum showed many of the same films, books and models

discussed at length in Project Japan, so both the exhibition and

the book feed on and process many of the same information

bundles in ways that complement each other. Museum exhibi-

tions and publications dedicated to architectural research make

use of the same informational systems invoked by design, creat-

ing efficient feedback systems with the viewing public. Both theexhibition and the book are as much an information-jammed

junk space of modernity as Tokyo itself. The “Blade Runner”

views of Tokyo from the top floor of the Mori Tower, with its

hefty machinic profile, provided an appropriate setting for wall-

sized screens showcasing newly created animations of Metabo-

list megastructure models. In the case of OMA’s CCTV tower in

Beijing, the Metabolist philosophy of the megastructure has

become a reality. Megastructures, considered by many

architectural historians as a bothersome pastime of visionaryarchitects, or relegated to “artistic specula-tion,” have entered

the realm of possibility in other parts of the globe. It can be

recognized in the outlines of Japanese Metabo-lism that design

must maintain a connection to life. Similar to genetic

mutations, divisions between technology and nature were

successfully merged in the urban tissue of contemporary Tokyo.

Sarah Stanley is a writer based in New York and Berlin.

Documents

Japanese Design Metabolism and Contemporary Tokyo