Metabolism (architecture)

Metabolism (Japanese: メタボリズム, Hepburn: metaborizumu; also shinchintaisha (新陳代謝)) was a post-war Japanese biomimetic architectural movement that fused ideas about architectural megastructures with those of organic biological growth. It had its first international exposure during CIAM's 1959 meeting and its ideas were tentatively tested by students from Kenzo Tange's MIT studio.

During the preparation for the 1960 Tokyo World Design Conference, a group of young architects and designers, including Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa and Fumihiko Maki, prepared the publication of the Metabolism manifesto. They were influenced by a wide variety of sources, including Marxist theories and biological processes. Their manifesto was a series of four essays entitled: Ocean City, Space City, Towards Group Form, and Material and Man, and it also included designs for vast cities that floated on the oceans and plug-in capsule towers that could incorporate organic growth. Although the World Design Conference gave the Metabolists exposure on the international stage, their ideas remained largely theoretical.

Some smaller, individual buildings that employed the principles of Metabolism were built and these included Tange's Yamanashi Press and Broadcaster Centre and Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower. The greatest concentration of their work was to be found at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, where Tange was responsible for master planning the whole site whilst Kikutake and Kurokawa designed pavilions. After the 1973 oil crisis, the Metabolists turned their attention away from Japan and toward Africa and the Middle East.

The Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) was founded in Switzerland in 1928 as an association of architects who wanted to advance modernism into an international setting. During the early 1930s they promoted the idea (based upon new urban patterns in the United States) that urban development should be guided by CIAM's four functional categories: dwelling, work, transportation, and recreation. By the mid-1930s Le Corbusier and other architects had moulded CIAM into a pseudo-political party with the goal of promoting modern architecture to all. This view gained some traction in the immediate post-war period when Le Corbusier and his colleagues began to design buildings in Chandigarh. By the early 1950s it was felt that CIAM was losing its avant-garde edge so in 1954 a group of younger members called "Team 10" was formed. This included the inner circle Dutch architects Jacob Bakema and Aldo van Eyck, Italian Giancarlo De Carlo, Greek Georges Candilis, the British architects Peter and Alison Smithson and the American Shadrach Woods. The Team 10 architects introduced concepts like "human association", "cluster" and "mobility", with Bakema encouraging the combination of architecture and planning in urban design. This was a rejection of CIAM's older four function mechanical approach, and it would ultimately lead to the break-up and end of CIAM.

Kenzo Tange was invited to the CIAM '59 meeting of the association in Otterlo, Netherlands. In what was to be the last meeting of CIAM, he presented two theoretical projects by the architect Kiyonori Kikutake: the Tower-shaped City and Kikutake's own home, the Sky House. This presentation exposed the fledgling Metabolist movement to its first international audience. Like Team 10's "human association" concepts, Metabolism too was exploring new concepts in urban design.

Tower-shaped City was a 300-metre-tall (980 ft) tower that housed the infrastructure for an entire city. It included transportation, services and a manufacturing plant for prefabricated houses. The tower was vertical "artificial land" onto which steel, pre-fabricated dwelling capsules could be attached. Kikutake proposed that these capsules would undergo self-renewal every fifty years, and the city would grow organically like branches of a tree.

Constructed on a hillside, the Sky House is a platform supported on four concrete panels with a hyperbolic paraboloid shell roof. It is a single space divided by storage units with the kitchen and bathroom on the outer edge. These latter two were designed so that they could be moved to suit the use of the house—and, indeed, they have been moved and/or adjusted about seven times over the course of fifty years. At one point a small children's room was attached to the bottom of the main floor with a small child-sized access door between the two rooms.

After the meeting, Tange left for Massachusetts Institute of Technology to begin a four-month period as a visiting professor. It is possible that based upon the reception of Kikutake's projects in Otterlo he decided to set the fifth year project as a design for a residential community of 25,000 inhabitants to be constructed on the water of Boston Bay. Tange felt a natural desire to produce urban designs based upon a new prototype of design, one that could give a more human connection to super-scale cities. He considered the idea of "major" and "minor" city structure and how this could grow in cycles like the trunk and leaves of a tree.