ABSTRACT

This edited book explores and promotes reflection on how the lessons of Metabolism experience can inform current debate on city making and future practice in architectural design and urban planning. More than sixty years after the Metabolist manifesto was published, the author’s original contributions highlight the persistent links between present and past that can help to re-imagine new urban futures as well as the design of innovative intra-urban relationships and spaces.

The essays are written by experienced scholars and renowned academics from Japan, Australia, Europe, South Korea and the United States and expose Metabolism’s special merits in promoting new urban models and evaluate the current legacy of its architectural projects and urban design lessons. They offer a critical, intellectual, and up-to-date account of the Metabolism projects and ideas with regard to the current evolution of architectural and urbanism discourse in a global context.

The collection of cross-disciplinary contributions in this volume will be of great interest to architects, architectural and urban historians, as well as academics, scholars and students in built environment disciplines and Japanese cultural studies.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|14 pages

Back from Behind the Curtain of Oblivion

Metabolism and the Postwar Actuality of Japan

chapter 2|23 pages

The Aesthetics and/or Formalism of Change

Paradoxes and Contradictions in the Metabolist Movement

chapter 3|16 pages

Engineering a Poetic Techno-urbanism

The Metabolists' Visionary City in Postwar Japan

chapter 4|12 pages

The Metabolists in Context

chapter 5|11 pages

The Infrastructure of Care

Metabolist Architecture as a Social Catalyst

chapter 6|17 pages

“Sunday Carpenter” Metabolism

Artificial-Land Housing and Resident Decision-Making

chapter 7|13 pages

Maki and Dutch Team X

Step towards Group Form

chapter 8|17 pages

Kiyonori Kikutake circa 2011

Sustaining Life through Metabolism

chapter 9|11 pages

Metabolism as Survival Architecture

chapter 10|18 pages

Metabolism Adventure

A Personal View

chapter 11|13 pages

This is Your City

The Pop Future Foretold by Metabolism

chapter 12|11 pages

Spaceship Earth

Metabolist Capsules, the Petro-economy, and Geoengineering

chapter 13|11 pages

An Eternal Return?

Considering the Temporality and Historicity of Metabolism

chapter |4 pages

Afterword

Gevork Hartoonian