Review of ‘The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction’
Gardner, William, O., The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Note: I wrote this review for Utopian Studies: The Journal of the Society of Utopian Studies, and an edited version of that review will appear in the next issue of that journal. I came across both Gardner’s book and the Utopian Studies journal at the 2023 annual conference of the Society of Utopian Studies, in Austin Texas. The conference was a revelation — both in terms of the serious study, historical and theoretical of utopianism as a subject and due to the sheer scope of interdisciplinarity.
The future city in ruins, a recurring theme of the period, was simultaneously a reassertion of history, an apocalyptic prediction, and an incubation bed for yet another future.” (Gardner, 3)
The Metabolists, a loose-knit group of Japanese architects and designers active from 1960 to the early 1970s, conceived of cities having the qualities of a living creature — the city as a body made up of constituent small parts with different roles in circulating and using resources, in the same way that individual cells build organs that do the work of metabolizing food or oxygen for the whole organism. These cells live, decay, and die over time, as does, eventually, the larger body that contains them. The Metabolist vision includes an expansive idea of both scale and duration, as well as an embrace of “natural” cycles of growth, transformation, and decay, somewhat in opposition to the then-dominant European modernist concepts of linear progress and normative order.
In The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction (2020), William O. Gardner draws out a connection between the Metabolist architecture movement and science fiction literature in mid-century Japan. He suggests that not only did science fiction writers and their stories influence the Metabolist movement, but that architecture and science fiction have a commonality as platforms for imagining future spaces and modes of living. He also briefly (but tantalizingly) describes how Metabolist design has come full circle to be reflected in both internationally popular Japanese anime films like Akira (1988) and the orientalized urban atmospherics of western science fiction movies such as Blade Runner (1982).
Gardner teaches Japanese language, literature, and film at Swarthmore College. His previous book-length publication is Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s is a work of comparative literature focused on the intersection of rapid modernization and commercialism with modern literature in 1920s Japan. Much of the science fiction literature Gardner mentions in The Metabolist Imagination, such as the work of Sakyō Komatsu (Japan Sinks, Virus: The Day of Resurrection) is not well known in the United States. Nor do the more design-focused resources on the Metabolist movement take the time to describe the economic, political, and cultural environment of early 1960s Japan with this book’s detail and expressiveness. In this way, despite being neither an architectural historian or theorist, Gardner’s breadth of knowledge of both Japanese literature and history makes him well positioned to articulate for us in the United States the influence that contemporary science fiction writing may have had on Metabolist architects and vice versa.
In the introduction to The Metabolist Imagination, Gardner lays out his thesis: that Japanese science fiction writers contemporary to the Metabolist movement were central to its conception and that science fiction and architecture share a common interest in envisioning prospective human habitats. Gardner discusses the broader European-dominant international culture of modernist architectural design into which the Metabolists emerged, and contrasts this with the Metabolist ethos. He also introduces the primary vocabulary of Metabolist design: capsules, megastructures, and apocalyptic ruins, all of which are defined and detailed in later chapters.
In the first chapter, “City Visions”, Gardner goes into great detail about the cultural and structural aftermath of the destruction visited on Japanese cities during WWII and the US occupation that followed. Into this milieu of complete devastation followed by rapid economic growth, the Metabolists emerged with a 90-page printed manifesto booklet entitled Metabolism: The Proposals for New Urbanism at the World Design Conference in Tokyo in 1960. The conference was the first post-war design conference to be held in Asia, and many of the heavy hitters of European and American modernism came to Tokyo to take part, including star architect Louis Kahn and noted designers Herbert Bayer, Saul Bass, and Max Huber. In the Metabolism booklet, Kikutake, a key member of the nascent Metabolist group, laid out his speculative “Ocean City” concept, which consisted of an enormous archipelago or “megastructure” of “artificial land” onto which individual “capsule” structures for living or working could be plugged. These themes of megastructure and individuated, mobile capsules would continue to be circulated throughout the group’s work.
The group’s apotheosis was the 1970 Japan World Exposition in Osaka (or “Expo ‘70”). Expo ’70 was one of a series of “world’s fairs” held throughout the 19th and 20th century in which nations and regions gathered to exhibit their industries, culture, and technological progress to the public according to pre-selected themes. At the Expo ’70 the Metabolists (and their prominent patron, master architect Kenzō Tange) presented an elaborate “Symbol Zone,” consisting of a broad horizontal “theme pavilion” interrupted by a giant vertical “Tower of the Sun” with multiple colorful anthropomorphic faces, containing levels for exhibitions investigating the past, present, and future. Huge anthropomorphic robots contained the lighting and sound controls for the performance stage. The Metabolists Kurokawa Kishō and Kamiya Kōji used the international platform of the Expo to further articulate their “capsules for living” which could be plugged into the Tange-designed space-frame roof. Kurokawa would later use these concepts to design perhaps the most famous of the actually-built Metabolist structures, the Nakagin Capsule Tower, recently destroyed in 2022 after a long preservation battle.
While the Metabolist movement lasted little more than a decade by most accounts, from its founding at the 1960 World Design Conference to its generally-agreed-upon dissolution following the 1973 global oil crisis, the group’s members were quite prolific in terms of actually constructing buildings, especially as compared to their European and American architectural counterparts in groups such as Superstudio, Archigram, and Ant Farm, who built very little and operated primarily as “paper architects” in the purely speculative realm of schematics and proposals.
The Metabolists seem to have been forgotten for a period following the 1973 oil crisis and Japan’s subsequent severe recession (and resulting lack of funding for new buildings), but the movement has seen a recent gradual but steady resurgence of interest. This renewal of engagement might be spurred by the movement’s pervading interest in urban-planning-for-the-end-times, which in 1960s Japan was spurred by an anxious look in the rearview mirror at the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the early 21st century apocalypse is back as we face a combination of climate-change exacerbated natural disasters, global pandemics, and political upheaval (what the science fiction writer William Gibson refers to as “the jackpot” in his novel The Peripheral). This resonance has resulted in some English-language publications focused on the Metabolist movement over the last 15 years or so, most notable perhaps being Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s 2011 Project Japan: Metabolism Talks, which compiles oral histories with the still-living key members of the movement. While the Koolhaas and Ulrich Obrist book is an interesting look at how these architects perceive themselves (and is better illustrated), it does not attempt to articulate a theory of how speculative literature and architecture intersect and how that intersection influences culture inside and outside of national borders.
Gardner suggests that aspects of Japan’s culture (i.e.: building with lightweight materials, the tradition of rebuilding temples on a cyclical basis), ecology (the island country’s location on a fault line, making it subject to earthquakes and tsunami), and its then-recent history (the complete destruction of Tokyo due to Allied firebombing, as well as the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) created the imaginative conditions for the Metabolist vision. The designers articulated a wholesale re-envisioning of the city as an urban environment integrated into both technology and ecology, which could serve the needs of both individuals and society while withstanding the inevitable and cyclical destruction.
Unlike most of the other available English-language texts on the Metabolist movement, this book is not focused on a representation or analysis of the designs themselves. Instead, it takes the unusual tactic of using literature as both a lens through which to view the design movement and a screen upon which the cultural effects of that design movement are reflected. This is not a book for the student architect interested in exalting avant-garde heroes of the built environment. Instead it takes a sensitive look at the cultural and economic conditions that led to a collective effort to totally re-envision the conditions for urban life, by both writers and designers. While Gardner makes a compelling argument for both architecture and speculative fiction as loci for re-envisioning spaces and modes of life, the influence of Metabolist ideas on contemporary Western science fiction, which seems clearly evident in films like The Matrix and The Fifth Element, is gestured at, but ultimately not clearly defined.
While Metabolism was utopian in the sense that it designed the structures and systems of a hoped-for brighter future — in which cities and the built environment would be responsive to the needs of individuals while also using technology to serve the requirements of a growing population — those designs were firmly embedded in, and perhaps even paranoid about, the real destruction Japan had seen within living memory and the prospective dangers Japan might face in the future, including plague, flooding, natural disaster, or future wars.
The dominant design ethos of today often posits itself as “finding solutions to particular and well articulated problems”. Facing the destruction of cities in our era’s climate calamities, we see the results of this methodology in the approach of “hardening” vulnerable areas with sea walls and berms. On the other hand the Metabolists (and as Gardner suggests, their literary interlocutors) took a visionary — and even at times fantastical -– approach to radical ground-up urban design for what were to them very real — but simultaneously very unstable -– future projections of myriad possible cataclysms.
