Japanese Metabolism

Metabolism (新陳代謝, shinchintaisha) was a post-war Japanese 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 Tōkyō 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 of: 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.

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