ABSTRACT
Kiyonori Kikutake and Kishō Kurokawa, members of Metabolism, sent their drawings to the “Visionary Architecture” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Two years later, they exhibited their own vision in Ikebukuro. This chapter examines the “This is Your City” exhibition, which was held at the Seibu Department Store, Ikebukuro on October 12–17, 1962, curated by the Metabolism group.
Metabolism is characteristic the era of rapid industrialization often remembered for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 Osaka Expo. The Mori Art Museum’s retrospective exhibition “Metabolism: The City of the Future” has emphasized this group as a manifestation of high economic growth that differentiates Japan from other countries of the time. Following this, it can be argued that Metabolism had the ability to forecast potential realities through urban planning. That said, I argue that Metabolism’s contribution was to believe in the power of images to visualize techno-utopia through an examination of the “This is Your City” exhibition installations, focusing on photos from the Archives of Osamu Murai. I also look into how Pop Art discourse provided an important but still unrecognized influence on the character of Metabolism.
