ABSTRACT
The Metabolist projects represented radical and systematic challenges to the established concepts of urbanism. Kenzo Tange’s 1960 Plan for Tokyo, in particular, had the most profound influence on the practice of urban design in postwar Japan. This plan was not only the outcome of collaboration between Tange and some Metabolists, but also a concentrated expression of Tange’s ideals regarding the modern city. Featuring an enormous linear series of interlocking loops expanding Tokyo across the Tokyo Bay, it culminated the decade-long megastructural movement that Reyner Banham documented in his 1976 Megastructure.1 Another historian, Hajime Yatsuka, also lauded Tange’s plan as “one of the most striking renditions of the crystallization of the ideas and philosophy of certain trends in urbanism during the twentieth century.”2
