This is a story about
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新陳代謝 metabolism
the post-war radical Japanese avant-garde movement. Although various masters and radical designers such as Yona Friedman, Archigram, Giancarlo De Carlo, Hans Ollein participated at Expo’70 in Osaka, in the following pages only a selection of japanese Metabolists works will be examined.
コンテキスト
CONTEXT
temporary future - Osaka 1970
Japan originally wanted to host an international expo in 1940, at the peak of its imperial ambitions. The one million people who bought tickets for Expo ’40, canceled with the escalation of the war, are allowed to use the same ticket to enter Expo ’70. Now, the Expo represents a different kind of power: in combination with the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Expo ’70 marks the completion of Japan’s postwar moral and economic rehabilitation – the “miracle” with had made it richer than any nation apart from the US – and the beginning of the shift in the world’s center of gravity from West to East. Japan has the confidence to predict the future form of the city under the benevolent theme “Progress and Harmony for Humankind”. Expo ’70 is also the apotheosis of the Metabolism: Tange, the Expo’s masteranger, commissions Kikutake to design the Expo Tower; he ask Ekuan to oversee the design of Expo’s street furniture and transportation, and Otaka to build a transport node on artificial ground. Independently, Kurokawa wins commissions for two corporate pavilions, one composed of capsules, the other modules. Tange also works with Isozaki, plus his colleagues Koji Kamiya and the independent structural
engineers Yoshikatsu Tsuboi and Mamoru Kawaguchi to create the Expo’s centerpiece, the colossal Big Roof and the open-air Festival Plaza beneath it. Taro Okamoto, an Expo producer, commissions Kawazoe to curate the Mis-Air Exhibition, embedded in the space frame of the Big Roof (for which the Metabolists and the international avant-garde collaborates for the first time). With government and private sector largesse that would shortly evaporate (the Expo costs, in 1970 terms, $2.9 billion), the Metabolists are able to realize some of their earliest dreams and inventions in an arena that embodies many of their fundamental ideas: a high tech city, pumping with vitality (64 million people visit over six souths, an average of about 345,000 per day), unburdened by any pretend of permanence.
As an apotheosis, Expo ’70 is also the beginning of a decline: it is the most intensive realization of the Metabolists ideas and a thrilling flourish of globalization, before of global the darker side o interdependence reveals itself in the oil crisis three years later and the Japanese economy contracts for the first time since 1945, suspending utopia indefinitely…1
文
CHARA 丹 下 健 三 KENZO TANGE
KISHO KUROKAWA
The years between the end of World War II and the declaration of Metabolism in 1960 are dominated by the creativity, pedagogy, and professional organizing of Kenzo Tange. Aged 32 at the end of the war, Tange begins a series of strategic steps not only to launch his own career but to reinvent the role of the architect in Japan. [...] he teaches and mentors future Metabolists Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, and fellowtraveler Arata Isozaki in the ingeniously named Tange Lab.2
Twenty-six years old when Metabolism began, Kisho Kurokawa was the youngest, most precious, and most photogenic member of the group and would soon become the most prolific. Three revelations in the space of two years –post graduate study at Tange Lab, disillusion after a visit to the USSR In 1958, and the collapse of CIAM and its static modern vision– turned Kurokawa into periaps the exemplary Metabolist. In the run up to Expo’70, Kurokawa’s metamorphosis from architect (only) into media icon and political player accellerated.3
temporary future - Osaka 1970
黒 川 紀 章
字
temporary future - Osaka 1970
CTERS 菊 竹 清 訓 KIYONORI KIKUTAKE After the war, kikutake’s ancestral land is confiscated by the US occpyng forces –an attempt to eradicate the remants of feudalism. For Kikutake, 19, it is an insult added to a deeper injury– the geological instability, and stifling shortage, of Japan.s land. Frustrated on all sides, he embarks on a lifelong search for alternative surfaces on wich to build...4
榮 久 庵 憲 司
KENJI EKUAN
Kenji Ekuan brought compelling professional experience and personal conviction when he joined the Metabolists not as an architect but as an industrial designer at the 1960 World Design Conference. [...] Visiting Hiroshima after the bomb –at the age of 16– was the formative experience for what was this belief: left of the man-made world assumed a massive, desperate significance; design, Ekuan thought, could help relaunch the shattered nation.5
temporary future - Osaka 1970
KEN ZO TAN GE
temporary future - Osaka 1970
In 1966, the Expo masterplan is assigned, in a characteristically Japanese compromise, to two masterplanners: Professor Uzo Nishiyama of Kyoto University and Professor Range of Tokyo University. But the physical and ideological distance between the two camps—Nishiyama has a Marxist background, Tange is seen as representing the establishment—soon renders collaboration impossible, so the work is divided: Nishiyama makes the initial concept, and Tange will flesh out the masterplan. [...] When Tange assumes full control of the project, he assembles a team of 13 architects-including Kikutake, Isozaki, Kamiya, and Otaka-to help com plete which is the masterplan, structured as a “tree” with a trunk (the symbol zone), branches (moving walkways and streets), and “petals” (pavilions). Range, shrewd as ever, keeps Nishiyama’s concept of a Festival Plaza, which becomes the icon of Expo 70. To give Festival Plaza shelter (Isozaki points out that it rains a lot in Osaka, especially in June-Expo 70 runs March-September), and to give Expo 70 an icon, Range conceives the Big Roof: a futuristic and benevolent canopy-the largest space frame in the world-over the 29,170 square meter Festival [...] Plaza.[...]
The covering itself consists of 274 air-inflated transparent panels (the design of which is used 38 years later in the Water Cube for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and for Japan’s pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai). Like the Crystal Palace, made for the first expo in 1851, the Big Roof is an all-over structure fostering unity; at the heart of Expo 70 it stands in opposition to the closedness, fragmentation, and rivalry of the 116 individual pavilions. Artist Taro Okamoto is offered the position of Expo producer, in charge of the exhibitions underneath, in, and over Festival Plaza. He accepts on the condition that Tange’s hitech, futuristic Big Roof is pierced with a brutal and populist monument: the Tower Tange resists at of the Sun. first but is convinced of Okamoto’s contrarian logic after repeated visits to his studio. The unlikely colla boration creates a monumental juxtaposition in Festival Plaza that goes to the heart of Japan-ness: the refined Yayoi (Tange) vs. the primal Jomon (Okamoto). Ten years after the World Design Conference, Tange again mobilizes promising new architects, and the now wellestablished Metabolists, for a massive collective effort— this time in building the image of their nation.6
temporary future - Osaka 1970
temporary future - Osaka 1970
太 陽
temporary future - Osaka 1970
KI SHO KUR OKA WA
temporary future - Osaka 1970
Toshiba IHI pavilion Kurokawa
Takara Beautillion Kurokawa with Ekuan/GK
For Toshiba and the IHI heavy industry and shipbuilding company, Kurokawa develops a space frame comprised of tetrahedron units, supporting a giant Global Vision Theater raised and lowered by hydraulics. A small scale application of the modular principle of his Helix City, the framework can grow in 14 different directions, and Kurokawa flaunts the formal possibilities with extrusions that resemble As with the natural growth. Takara Beautillion, ease of dismantling is key; after the Expo, Kurokawa sends the steel tetrahedrons back to the furnaces for recycling.7
With the Takara conglomerate of furniture and beauty companies providing a budget, Kurokawa builds the Beautillion. It is an elaboration of his single capsule in-spaceframe project, the Odakyu roadside restaurant, and his 1962 plan for prefab Box-Type Apartments. The capsule, which started life as a democratic and even mobile/pioneering-tool for individual living and individual freedom, becomes here the ideal unit for showcasing Takara’s beauty products in luxury minishowrooms (with interiors designed by Ekuan and sound design by Toshi Ichiyanagi). Capsules plug into a framework of six-pointed crosses, with multiple “unfinished” extrusions, indicating the (inevitably unrealized) possibility of adding more capsules and more framework in the future. Thanks to the ease of the construction system, the Beautillion is assembled on site in only six days, and is disassembled just as quickly after the Expo. Kurokawa later describes the Beautillion, a structure planned for impermanence, as “a classic example of Metabolism, and one in which Japan’s Buddhist aesthetics can be seen.”8
temporary future - Osaka 1970
temporary future - Osaka 1970
temporary future - Osaka 1970
KIY ONO RI KIK UTA KE
temporary future - Osaka 1970
Expo Tower Kikutake Kikutake seizes the possibility of finally realizing something like his Tower-Shaped Community from 1958 (drawing below):a tower made of a central core and capsules (or move-nets, as he calls them) that can plug in like leaves on a tree. eaves on a tree. But a budget crisisironically caused in part by the inflation that Accompanies the Expo hypeforces a drastic reduxtion and the of his ambition, Expo Tower becomes a hollow vertical space frame, holding only a few capsules, used as viewing platforms, 120 meters high.9
KEN JI EKU AN
Transportation and Street Furniture Ekuan/GK Rather than miscellaneous elements, Ekuan treats sreet furniture and transportation as intrinsic, unified tools which bring to the Expo all the functions of a city. He designs postboxes, which become ubiquitous throughout Japan, multi-face clocks (110 of them), electric cars both for Kunio Maekawa automobile pavilion and for the Expo taxis, telephone booths, lighting, public address systems, and signage.The The concept of street furniture concept of street furniture as a crucial urban element is as a crucial urban element is born as a result of Ekuan’s born as a result of Ekuan’s endeavor at Expo ‘70.1010 endeavor at Expo ‘70.
遺産
LEGACY
Isozaki laments how the burgeoning neoliberalism under the Tanaka government, together with the oil crisis, drains the state money available for grandscale planning and optimism... “How to represent the will of the nation was the fundamental framework of Tange’s architectural conception up to Expo ‘70.His national-scaled “megastructure“ planning concept in the ‘60s also stemmed from this framework of thought. Entering the 1970s, Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka (197274) besieged the regime and began restructuring the nation’s physical organization calling it Retto Kaizo– remodeling of the Japanese Archipelago. Tange was among many of those who were involved in the operations of the government, and proposed ideas. The power of the nation itself began waning right after its peak at Expo’ 70. Then came the global oil shock of 1973,
followed by the Lockheed bribery scandal of 1976. This was the time when the US had begun recovering from defeat in the Vietnam War and was introducing the concept of neoliberalism into global capital. This had such a significant impact on Japan as a modern nation-state that it also had to change its fundamental flow of capital. In my view, Tanaka was the first victim of this turbolence, shot down by the Lockheed affair. And so were the Metabolists, at least so it seemed to an outsider. In fact, the power of the Japanese nation-state waned gradually. In the case of the US, Reagan and Thatcher collaborated in the so-called Reaganomics of the ‘80s. In the case of Japan, capital gradually and inconspicuously integrated with the nationstate. It was Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone (1982-87) who articulated this trend in his new Minkatsu policy, or mobilization of private resources. This policy was nothing but a means to allow a nation-state to be taken over by capital. Japan then plunged into the Bubble Economy, which came to an end almost at same time as the bipolar confrontation. The Soviet Union dissolved, but the nation-state of Japan? I wonder if it had already ceased to exist by then.11 Arata Isozaki, April 2010
temporary future - Osaka 1970
Expo ‘70 is an unadulterated success in terms of media coverage, popularity, and profitability. But it turns out to be a point of no return in a series of modern transitions: from the nation-state to globalism, from the West to the East, from the public sector to the private, and, most critically for the Metabolists, from master planning on a grand scale to much more limited ambitions.
REFERENCES All the text in this publication, except the introduction, are from: Rem Koolhaas Hans Ulrich Obrist PROJECT JAPAN, METABOLISM TALKS... Taschen,2011 specifically: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
p. 507 p. 103 p. 373 p. 132 p. 475 pp.510-513 p. 530 p. 529 p. 527 p. 531 p. 528