ABSTRACT
This study of the post-World War II Japanese architectural movement calling itself Metabolism shows how nightmares of devastation can be acknowledged and integrated into a culture’s vision of its future. The idea of resiliency as a bouncing back to the same life prior to a disaster’s impact must be tempered with accepting the memories of painful events. The Metabolist architects all lived through the final war-ending horrors. The Metabolism 1960 manifesto includes Noboru Kawazoe’s poem “my dream 50 years hence,” which critiques Western architectural ideas and offers instead a Japanese vision inspired by continuity amidst change, exemplified by the Ise Shrine, which achieves permanence by being entirely rebuilt every twenty years as a prototype of Japanese architecture. Also in the publication is Kisho Kurokawa’s Mushroom House, which avoids touching the ground and at the same time blocks out the air. Formed after the atomic bomb explosion, the focus is on connecting to the heavens above. This loss proposes a possible future as a part of the process of mourning. The Metabolist movement reconceived master plans from being blueprints for development to accepting a process of growing and withering.
