Pod Tier

Even if you’ve never heard of Metabolism, you’ve seen Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972) in Tokyo’s Ginza district and likely noted the uncanny resemblance of its pods to commercial washing machines. The firmness with which this pixel-like pile has lodged itself in the panorama of the last century’s visual culture is owed, in no small part, to an aggressive marketing campaign—reconstructed in one gallery of The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower at the Museum of Modern Art. Pamphlets and brochures are chockablock with gaudily hued illustrations; a commemorative night-light recapitulates avant-garde architecture as kitsch commodity; and in a film produced by the builder, the Taisei construction company, the architect Kurokawa (seen sporting long black locks swept to one side plus a Beatles-y suit) and his equally groovy colleagues chain-smoke while casually extolling the “individualization” of society that their plug-and-play pied-à-terre project foretells. A blow-up facsimile of a poster preaching Kurokawa’s capsule ideology is all Dayglo colors and wonky speech bubbles. In the Archigram imaginary it evinces, Arthur Young’s bubble-canopied Bell-47D1 Helicopter (1945), normally anchored to MoMA’s third-floor ceiling, would air-drop the museum’s newly acquired capsule—Capsule A1305, to be exact—into the sculpture garden, where it would act out a kawaii sequel to the Japanese Exhibition House by Junzō Yoshimura, which stood on the same spot in the mid-1950s.

Of the 140 capsules that formerly comprised the landmark Metabolist building, demolished in 2022, twenty-three were rescued from the scrapyard by international institutions. But the New York arrival of a vestige of one of postwar modernism’s most totemic projects seems less like a diaspora than a jolly homecoming, the preparations for which have been ample. The Nakagin Capsule Tower was featured in MoMA’s 1979 show Transformations in Modern Architecture and then again in Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling in 2008. Its structural engineer, the artful Gengo Matsui, was celebrated in the 2019 show Structural Lineages: Learning from Japanese Structural Design. And then, of course, like Tokyoites, New Yorkers are accustomed to tight accommodations.

Launched in Tokyo in 1960 by young protégés of Kenzo Tange, Metabolism advocated for an architectural ethic and aesthetic premised on combining different rates of change in design. Kurokawa and his coconspirators—the architects Kiyonori Kikutake, Fumihiko Maki, and Masato Otaka; the industrial designer Kenji Ekuan and graphic designer Kiyoshi Awazu; and the critic and editor Noboru Kawazoe—came to maturity as the “ashes generation” in the wreckage of postwar Japan, which by 1960 was on the precipice of an economic golden age. Metabolism, then, was an enticement to new beginnings. Often technophilic, it was intended to have mass appeal while also overcoming stultifying social norms. Its thinking was both pre- and supra-architectural: Proposals for an entire city were analogized to Watson and Crick’s double helix model of DNA. Coiners of the term megastructure, the Metabolists formed at nearly the same time as Archigram, the go-go London design collective whose pop-inflected projects had the frequent distinction of being unbuildable. Though it shared a frothy excitement for novelty, Metabolism succeeded in penetrating the mainstream in its host country. Already by the middle of the decade, its ideas had taken hold of the disciplinary center, and its principal actors had obtained something close to celebrity. Kikutake had pushed post-tensioned concrete about as far as it could go in a building for one of Japan’s oldest Shinto shrines, and Ekuan had achieved immortality as the shape giver of Kikkoman’s classic soy sauce bottle.

At Expo ’70 in Osaka, Kurokawa, who created two pavilions for the event, pulled off a feat that had so eluded the Archigram-ists: He built the dreams he spun at his drafting table. The expo was a prelude to the tower. More than anything else, he was a consummate pitchman, armed with one Big Idea: the capsule. Seen as a protective “cocoon” for the individual forcibly assimilated into the mass, a capsule, possibly augmented by state-of-the-art consumer goods (a color TV!), offered an antidote to Japanese conformity, allowing one’s subjectivities to blossom, to plug into or out of the “information society.” But the Ginza tower was emphatically marketed to a narrow set of buyers: the suburban salaryman with a corporate account. For this besuited, trendily coiffed demographic, a capsule was less a portal of restorative calm or creative incubator than a convenient pad to sleep off a drunken night on the town, far away from the wife and kids. Wall text acknowledges this dated demographic, so apparent in the original marketing materials mentioned.

The only thing missing from the fully restored Capsule A1305, in the show’s second gallery, is this salaryman himself. The interior of the capsule is a hundred-square-foot yacht cabin crossed with 2001-style futurism. Built-in cabinets integrate the quaint AV equipment of the period, and the same Sottsass typewriter glimpsed in the original publicity photos—and maybe borrowed from MoMA’s collection—has been restored to its erstwhile place. The exterior asbestos coating was stripped ahead of the module’s Midtown debut, and the fanned curtain over the big porthole window was duly replaced. It’s been more than fifty years since Capsule A1305 has looked this spiffy.

Before it was permanently disassembled, Nakagin had fallen into a kind of cyberpunk decay that appealed to a milieu of DJs, designers, urban-weekender couples, tea obsessives, and dedicated hobbyists with disposable—but far from inexhaustible—incomes. Kurokawa’s notion that the capsule inaugurated a new social type—homo movens—turned out to be belatedly correct. The myriad lifestyles at home in a veritable ruin are conveyed in the show via video interviews with former capsule dwellers; survey photos of DIY renovated interiors, stripped or crammed at times beyond recognition; and a navigable three-dimensional scan of the building, captured on the eve of its destruction. Importantly, these documents were not commissioned by MoMA but are the self-initiated projects of Nakagin’s passionate fan base, including one-time residents.

The focus on these later users—those able to own or rent a bit of capital-A architecture provided they put up with an order of deferred maintenance that long ago caused the salarymen to flee—puts the show in the realm of the post-occupancy evaluation (POE). Such a study, irresistible for an architectural movement predicated on change over time, foregrounds “a building’s occupants and their needs” in order to reveal “the consequences of past design decisions,” in the words of POE advocate Wolfgang Preiser. The willingness to take up this sociological method is commendable for an institution I associate more with the imperatives of, say, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (1929), a building that has no occupants. Nakagin was a rare convergence, for a spell, of new ideas and lifestyles supported—more accurately, provoked, in a way analogous to SoHo lofts—by old, run-down avant-garde architecture. Its qualified success is not reflected in the narrowness of Kurokawa’s original salaryman vision, but more richly, by the varied experiences of former residents of more recent vintage, a handful of whom appeared at the opening in the summer, there to be talked to.

But in their emphasis on the utility of an experimental work of architecture, the curators carefully omit mention of the capsule owners who reportedly voted overwhelmingly to sell, thus sealing the tower’s fate. Kurokawa had conjectured that the steel capsules—tension-bolted to a pair of interconnected concrete cores that acted as conduits for building services—could be easily replaced with new ones. His theory was undone by a simple construction detail; had it found its way into the galleries, the drawing of this detail would have revealed a shinglelike stacking of modules that foreclosed the possibility of localized, independent replacement. The oversight seems inexplicable, given how such a detail is as decisive to Kurokawa’s Metabolism as the corner detail is to Mies’s Seagram Building (1958). Compounding the problem were erratic air-conditioning and plumbing systems that, due to their unfortunate entanglement with the capsules and cores, could not be readily repaired. The gloom that had set on Nakagin wouldn’t be easily lifted. Grasping this, the majority of owners simply called it quits on the project.

For Kurokawa, capsule technology promised “emancipation … from the land,” but it was precisely the obdurate connection to land—the ability of the Ginza parcel to be redeveloped with a larger and far more valuable construction—that delivered Capsule A1305 to MoMA’s front door. The streetside gallery where it now resides occupies the spot on which the American Folk Art Museum (2001) stood for just thirteen years; the implacable demand of “highest and best use” has therefore provided both the space and the content of this exhibition. Designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, the eight-story building was a victim of MoMA’s expansionist agenda and the pitiless articulation given to it by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The firm declined to incorporate salvaged elements of the Folk Art Museum’s bronze façade into the westerly addition. (It opened in 2019.) Explained Elizabeth Diller, “We think of buildings synthetically.… Façades and buildings and their organization, their logic, are tied entirely together.” By contrast, the provision (at least theoretical) for untying a building’s componentry was wholly part of Nakagin’s logic. This bare fact throws into question how much we should continue to think of the tower as a failure, while also illuminating the extent to which Metabolism was prepared to break from the prevailing Western modernist model, with its false equivalence of integration and integrity.

The curators are certainly correct to identify Nakagin as the “most iconic realized example of Metabolism.” But most iconic does not mean best. The Motomachi and Chojuen Apartments in Hiroshima, by the Metabolist Otaka, were occupied by many hibakusha (those impacted by the atomic bombing), beginning in 1972; the estate’s combined 4,499 apartments were renovated, and, in many cases, even enlarged, in an ambitious undertaking completed in 2022. These dates are the same as Nakagin’s lifespan. The structural skeleton worked out by Otaka had anticipated future adaptation with uncanny precision, and yet the Hiroshima housing has no international fan base and has never been highlighted in a MoMA exhibition. By insisting on the singularity of Kurokawa’s creation, The Many Lives reinforces the unfortunate impression that there was a single Metabolism: one made of capsules and with a major budget for advertising.