![]() … We have before our eyes fragments of cities in the process of flux.” 6 Here the organic metaphors which the Metabolists had often used to describe change in the physical environment were extended to flows of energy and information. The future city is ruins.” 5 For Isozaki, buildings and cities were momentary fragments in a context of fluidity: “Viewed in terms of the time axis of transformation, the city is in a liquid state of constant organic reproduction and division. Isozaki Arata’s influential essay “Invisible City,” published seven years after the Metabolist manifesto, echoed its language: “Design, or architecture, becomes reality when it overlaps with its own extinction. The dematerialization of the city proved to be a resonant theme. If we are to formulate an idea of the city of the future, we must, I think, find it within this mobility, this ceaseless transformation.” Rather than pursuing a fixed form or “master plan,” Kawazoe felt architects and city planners should strive for a “continuous program,” wherein “each part should be so designed that intense metabolic changes can take place freely within it.” 4 ![]() As Kawazoe Noburu wrote, in 1961, “The rapidity of the metabolic changes in Tokyo in particular is without a parallel. 3 But the Metabolists were not interested in merely extending traditional techniques to a modern context they extrapolated from these principles to propose new designs, made with new materials and methods, at every scale, from the housing unit to the metropolis to the symbolic realm. This idea was informed by the flexible, modular forms of traditional Japanese architecture, in which “fittings” such as windows, shutters, doors, interior walls and screens, and tatami flooring components, set within a stable wooden framework, could be replaced or altered according to cycles of wear, the demands of weather and season, or changing living patterns. The Metabolists believed that architecture and the city should be designed to remain open to processes of growth, decline, and transformation. For Isozaki Arata, the invisible city was a space of cybernetic interaction where ‘technology and planning overlap.’ Against this background, a group of young architects authored the manifesto Metabolism 1960: The Proposals for New Urbanism, which sought to reimagine the city at a time when high economic growth and large-scale government investments in infrastructure encouraged daring solutions to the problems of rapid urbanization. Large areas in nearly all of Japan’s major cities had been leveled in World War II, and fifteen years later they were reemerging, in a more or less chaotic fashion, denser than before. This was simultaneously a reassertion of history, an apocalyptic prediction, and an incubation bed for yet another future. Discourses of mirai (the future literally the “not-yet-come”) proliferated through architectural projections of the “future city” ( mirai toshi) and proposals for “future studies” ( miraigaku), while past traumas were rescripted, in both architecture and fiction, through the motif of a future city in ruins. In the decade leading up to the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, their works converged in an exploration of futurity and a repurposing of the past. This is especially true for the Metabolist architects - and the writers they mixed with socially and professionally - in postwar Japan. Placing them side by side helps us see modern architects as authors of narrative, while appreciating SF writers for their role in imagining the interactions of built and natural environments and the consequences for human lives. Some of these are architectural proposals, and some are works of fiction. A second, virtual city overlapping the physical city. Architecture becoming liquid, invisible, indistinguishable from images. The family home reconceived as the mutual docking of capsules belonging to migratory, autonomous individuals. Industrial cities floating off the Pacific coast of Japan, linking, expanding, shrinking, and shifting their locations according to economic demands. ![]() 1 A sprawling horizontal city remapped onto giant, vertical, spiral structures, with recyclable, movable housing pods plugging into the helix framework. The author of a plan or a story imagines an intervention in the environment and a change in the lives of its inhabitants, which is revealed through narrative consequences. Isozaki Arata, Clusters in the Air (1960-62).Īrchitecture and science fiction are interrelated forms.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |