“It is my belief that the cultures of different countries will stand individually but together, allied with technology, to provide the future language of architecture. That modern architecture appears diffuse is proof that the cultures of different regions each contribute to the language of modern architecture, and as a result modern architecture will probably come to speak not with a lingua franca but with a complex and many-faceted language.”
-Kisho Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture
In July 2026, MoMA NYC wrapped up a year-long exhibition titled The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, a tribute to one of the most ambitious buildings in history. The scheme consisted of 140 units, each the size of a traditional Japanese tea room, and was designed to be at once a home for Japan’s burgeoning professional class of salarymen, an incubator for small businesses, and a financial opportunity for a real-estate company. It began, however, as the dream of a small group of Japanese architects, graphic designers, and philosophers. Behind the tower, we find the Metabolists, a collective that embraced difference and staged a countermovement against the wave of Western architectural theory.
During the 1960s, after a sustained economic and technological boom, Japan grew into an economic powerhouse and re-entered the world stage. A country in steady recovery, Japan’s post-war industries were in full swing. Metabolism emerged as a reaction to Modernist architecture and was part of Japan’s post-war struggle for its identity amid a growing Western influence. The movement emphasised the incorporation of natural principles into architecture and drew upon a heady mixture of biology, Modernist architecture, and Zen Buddhism. Led by young emerging architects under the guidance of Kenzo Tange, Metabolism received an international stage in 1960 when their ideas were compiled into a series of essays and speculative designs called Metabolism: The Proposals for New Urbanism, presented at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo. Though heavily influenced by natural concepts, the buildings were designed to take advantage of mass industrialisation and factory fabrication while remaining synchronised with the surrounding environment. Instead of technology being a means to conquer nature, this version of post-war Japan saw the new tools as a way to build alongside it, following the devastation of war. This produced a seemingly contrarian acceptance of technology, and birthed an era of techno-optimism that continued for decades until the collapse of the Japanese economy in 1990.
"Instead of technology being a means to conquer nature, this version of post-war Japan saw the new tools as a way to build alongside it."
In the 1960s, however, the movement was largely constrained within a collection of writings and speculative designs by its members. Kisho Kurokawa, in particular, was enamoured with Metabolism, and continued to publish writings, technical drawings, and diagrams describing ‘capsule theory’ and the need to reimagine Tokyo’s urban life in an era of mechanisation and consumerism. After a decade of writing and presenting these ideas, several of the Metabolists received commissions from Kenzo Tange to design multiple sections of the Osaka World Exposition, which opened in 1970. The highly positive reception of their designs drew the attention of the Nakagin Company, which funded and oversaw the development and maintenance of the (in)famous Nakagin Capsule Tower — though only until the decay set in. Save for the efforts of its residents, the building was left largely neglected until its demolition in 2022.
When Idea becomes Icon
As the most famous building commissioned to the Metabolists, the Nakagin Capsule Tower became synonymous with the group — a case in point proved as the sole focus of the recent exhibition by MoMA. Instead of isolating and reducing the history of the Metabolists into a singular structure, curators Evangelos Kotsioris and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel sought to expand the meanings of the building in a very “metabolic”, multivariate manner, in an attempt to parallel the movement’s ideology. In Metabolist architecture, the fabrication may be fixed, but the structures themselves were expected to grow and decay according to their environment needs, both natural and man-made, and even the lifecycle of their inhabitants. This ran contrary to extant beliefs in architecture, where most decisions were made to construct permanent, monolithic structures that attempt to stand against the test of time rather than evolving with it.
"In Metabolist architecture, the fabrication may be fixed, but the structures themselves were expected to grow and decay according to their environment needs, both natural and man-mad."
This metabolic notion of growth and decay was perhaps the most ambitious part of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, a residential and commercial building that was modular not in interior arrangements, but rather in fungible physical units. It feels wild to read about a building whose maintenance relied on a repair strategy akin to cellular growth, but it’s another experience entirely to see one of these “cells” in person. The capsule measured a scant 2.5 by 4 metres, compressing all modes of domestic life such that bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and office exist within a single line of sight.
No bigger than the average kitchen in New York City, the capsule nonetheless dominated the exhibition space of MoMA’s ground floor public gallery. The exhibition text proposed a pointed question: would you live here? In a city with a perpetual housing crisis, the capsule represents either a liveable future or a dystopian nightmare. However, to read it as a proposed solution to a contemporary crisis is to displace it from its original intention: not working-class shelter, but white-collar convenience. In the centre of the gallery yet exposed to Midtown passers-by, the capsule sat static and sterile, the mute icon of a lost dream. What reanimated its story were the video interviews of the tower’s tenants; through the tenants’ stories, we glimpse the vision the Metabolists had, finding hope and as close to a reaffirmation as there is of their success. In fact, capsule-owner Tatsuyuki Maeda and the Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project are the only reason that some capsules still exist at all, including the one at MoMA.
In the fallow years of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, as the building fell into disrepair, a community of remaining residents became active in the maintenance of the building. It was never made to endure in its entirety; the capsules were supposed to be prefabricated and substituted when repair became impossible — but the non-fungible, underlying infrastructure of the building was also starting to give way. At the end of the building’s life in 2022, Gluon ran the 3D Digital Archive Project, led by Keisuke Toyoda and Mitsuhiro Kanada, using tens of thousands of photographs, LiDAR and drone surveys. Separately, former residents worked with Yuta Tokunaga, a specialist in 360-degree architectural documentation, to make a photogrammetric model that was displayed in the exhibition. True to the technocentric beliefs of the Metabolists, even the destruction of the tower sparked a novel use of technology in architecture. Further still, the MoMA exhibition deployed a new way to explore the interactive model, using PlayStation controllers. If you’ve ever used a gamepad at home, you quickly realise the embodiment that is missing from a traditional mouse, keyboard and screen set-up. Reflecting on the intuitively ‘playable’ popularity of this exhibit, a community-led effort to repair and then digitally preserve the tower is a fitting tribute to champion the efforts of the Metabolists, even if the tower itself could not become what the architects had hoped.
Through a Dark Mirror
At the peak of the group’s activities, financial and political support must have seemed boundless as the nation’s architecture benefited from two major government agendas: to culturally empower Japan on the world stage after World War II, and to capitalise on the enormous national financial reserves designated for civil and business development. Architects, especially, found themselves tasked with an endless demand for designs, both novel and traditional, to accommodate the country's exponential population growth. This created a fertile environment for visionary thinkers to propose and build dozens of buildings that were both commissioned and ideologically approved by the government. The Metabolists — due in part to the already legendary domestic status attained by Kenzo Tange — found themselves in a position of great opportunity.
This story echoes what we see playing out in today’s sweeping technophoria, which arguably defines the 21st century. The Metabolist movement began as a way to reimagine urban space in Japan, but the Metabolism of its later and most popular years became a government-funded unicorn: a combination of brilliant technicians and supported visionaries, an insatiable appetite for building, and blank cheques. This same agglomeration sits at the foundation of much technocratically-driven architecture today, in the origins of now-popular software and hardware companies. Some of us have hoisted those at the vanguard of this moment up to the status of deities; in their benefaction, our individual consumption of and dependence on technology has reached an all-time high. In the dramatic cycle of avant-garde movements — where the rising hero eventually becomes the villain to the next hero — a speculative future emerges: where might the Metabolists be today if Japan’s economy — and the Nakagin expansion scheme itself — had not suffered the global shocks of the 1973 oil crisis? Would their technocratic hyperoptimism be transmuted into hypercapitalism?
"The Metabolist movement began as a way to reimagine urban space in Japan, but the Metabolism of its later and most popular years became a government-funded unicorn."
The individual Metabolists continued their careers, with broad success. Kenzo Tange reached new heights in his design of the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka; Kisho Kurokawa transcended architecture to become a household name within Japan, while Fumihiko Maki returned to Japan following a storied career in America to start his own firm, eventually winning the Pritzker Prize for his creative blend of material and culture. All cited the Metabolist movement as foundational to their later work.
To this day, the movement has largely been regarded as another short-lived avant-garde, future-forward episode in architecture. In the current climate, technology continues to draw decisive lines across and within society. Most of us use it without thinking, but there is a growing community of those who believe that our dependence — and the resources it consumes — will undoubtedly lead to dystopia. Yet like the Metabolists, many groups of engineers, thinkers, artists, and philosophers continue to put faith in the application of technology to build a better future.
Neither Harmony nor Fusion, but Symbiosis
My own fascination with Metabolism began not in the sprawling structures that came to represent the movement, but rather in architectural theory and a chance encounter with Kisho Kurokawa’s Philosophy of Symbiosis. I picked up the book by mistake — assuming it was about cybernetics — and found myself reading it once, then twice, then thrice. Philosophy of Symbiosis is part of Kurokawa’s closing chapter within the movement, and while he doesn’t represent the entire collective, the literature reveals the thinking of the group’s most vocal member. Over his lifetime, Kurokawa produced more than fifty books and maybe double that number of articles, essays, interviews, and lectures. At the height of his career, he was one of the most popular people in all of Japan; a frequent guest on television shows, he made media appearances, and even joined political gatherings. But before his stardom, he was a pupil of Kenzo Tange. If Metabolism could be separated into the imaginative and technical, Kurokawa sat firmly across those poles, asking: “What about both?”
The thinking behind Kurokawa’s Metabolism might be interpreted as a fusion of two approaches, a way to achieve harmony in clashing styles, or even an architecture that exists at some boundary between Western modernist practice and Eastern traditional thought. Yet a reading of Kisho Kurokawa’s Philosophy of Symbiosis shows exactly why none of these explanations hold up. The Metabolists were not trying to fuse two ways of thinking, with the imperative of creating a superior mode of architecture by taking the best parts of Western modernism and Japanese approaches to space, light and composition. Nor were they aiming for a compromise between the two, implying some great dissonance to be mediated, privileging a collective peace over individual difference. Symbiosis, a natural coexistence. Rather than aiming for harmonisation — a focus on differences to be resolved — the framework shifts towards the relationships that form the collective.
The book describes a paradigm shift, from the ‘Age of Machine Principle’ to the ‘Age of Life Principle’. As disparate points in the world become evermore connected, Kurokawa argued that the aims of society would shift further away from the oppositional poles of collective and individual models that dominated the twentieth century. Heavily inspired by Buddhist thought, Kurokawa’s philosophy of symbiosis envisioned a path where both the individual and the universal are considered equally vital. How does such a philosophy manifest? To Kurokawa, the philosophy of symbiosis was all-encompassing and had implications reaching economics, international relations, and especially architecture.
"Kurokawa’s philosophy of symbiosis envisioned a path where both the individual and the universal are considered equally vital."
A primary objective of the philosophy of symbiosis relies not only on a shift from “either/or” to “both/and”, but also on a departure from the dualism on which most of our decisions rely. In Philosophy of Symbiosis — as in Kurokawa’s designs — one perceives a focus on intermediating elements, which are represented in architecture as corridors, windows, lattice doors, and verandas, to name a few. Light and divisions of space in particular became a strong focal point for the architects within the Metabolists. So too in the MoMA exhibition; while the display was organised across clearly divided themes, the careful angling of the capsule itself — prominently visible from the large, street-facing windows — gave the illusion of an in-between space, allowing for the impression of peering into a life, or observing some private experiment.
For Kurokawa, the analogy of intermediate spaces — combined with ideas from Buddhist scholars and Japanese thinkers such as Umehara Takeshi — was necessary to challenge narratives that relied on comparison, competition, or even a clarity of understanding between cultures. Instead, his philosophy of symbiosis proposes the acknowledgement of a culture’s “sacred zone” — the private space in which the way a culture operates is incomprehensible yet respected. It's worth noting how close this sits to the Nihonjinron discourse ascendant in Japan during the years Kurokawa was writing. Visually, a sacred zone would be opaque, immediately conjuring strong parallels with Édouard Glissant’s theory of opacity, which arose from a colonised position: while very differently motivated, both Glissant and Kurokawa resonate with Deleuze and Guattari’s seminal works. Where two cultures meet, exchange occurs in an intermediary zone. Kurokawa saw the symbiotic recognition of each culture’s sacred zone, alongside the collaborative efforts within the intermediary zone, as a route towards the creation of a new and more appropriate language of architecture for an increasingly connected world — one that would grow together, and only together. Thinking back to the seemingly contradictory combination of nature and technology that became the signature of Metabolism, symbiosis illuminates a potential resolution of that tension.
More than half a century after the Nakagin Capsule Tower was built, Metabolism is still being actively researched, as testified by its appearance in the storefront of MoMA. The movement’s end came almost as sharply as its beginning, and the majority of what remains is contained in their writings and drawings; very few of the Metabolist urban proposals were constructed, while individual buildings enjoyed variously brief lives. A prescient and gifted set of thinkers and designers by every measure, their legacy is often constrained to the cultish annals of architectural history — recently punctuated by this timely, public-facing review — yet their story undoubtedly has more to offer.
"The movement’s end came almost as sharply as its beginning, and the majority of what remains is contained in their writings and drawings."
BIO
Ryan Webber is a cultural researcher interested in the role of people, places and technology in how we learn; he is also a lead curator for the Black Interactive Future Legends and installation engineer for Eunice Levis. With a professional background in cybersecurity, he is currently pursuing a Masters degree in Interactive Technology at New York University with a focus on exhibitions and new interfaces that promote immersive ways of learning. His ongoing research includes developing an archive of Jamaican visual and music history, creating installations to tell archived stories, and exploring Black fugitivity.
