ABSTRACT
The “New Wave” was the moniker Félix Guattari guardedly1 bestowed upon a generation of Japanese architects following on the late-1950s and early-1960s metabolist movement, a loose-knit group of avant-gardists influenced by Team X and Archigram, and including Kenzo Tange, Kisho Kurokawa, and Fumihiko Maki. The late-modern metabolist vision of an organic, mega-structural city of impermanent and changing systems faded quickly with the rise of postmodernism in the early 1970s. By the time Guattari had arrived in Japan, this post-metabolist generation had already turned away from postmodernism and was, as a result, two steps removed from late modernism per se. The dominant postmodernism of 1980s Japan, with its overwhelming emphasis on semiotics, was rejected in the advanced guard of Japanese architecture in favor of the nascent models of “desire” and “desiring machines” developed from Deleuze’s writings and architectural theory at large. The idea of the “machine” among these architects was not a literal mechanical model, but, as per Anti-Oedipus, a productive, generative assemblage that works. Despite their aloofness from metabolism and Japanese postmodernism, Guattari included among the New Wave three generations of architects, including: Kazuo Shinohara; Kazuhiro Ishii, Minoru Takeyama, Hiromi Fujii, Mayumi Miyawaki, Takefumi Aida, and Team Zoo of Waseda University (Tokyo); and Tadao Ando, Kito (Monta) Mozuna, Kijo Rokkaku, and Shin Takamatsu.2
