Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement Urban Utopias of Modern Japan

Amid Japan’s political turbulence in 1960, seven architects and designers founded Metabolism to propagate radical ideas of urbanism. Kenzo Tange’s Plan for Tokyo 1960 further celebrated urban expansion as organic processes and pushed city design to an unprecedented scale. Metabolists’ visionary schemes of future cities gave birth to revolutionary design paradigms, which reinvented the discourse of modern Japanese architecture and propelled it through the years of Economic Miracle to a global prominence. Their utopian concepts, which often envisaged the sea and the sky as human habitats of the future, reflected fundamental issues of cultural transformation and addressed environmental crises of the post-industrial society. This new edition expands Zhongjie Lin’s pathbreaking account on Tange and Metabolism centered at the intersection of urbanism and utopianism. The thorough historical survey, from Metabolism’s inauguration at the 1960 World Design Conference to the apex of the movement at Expo ’70 and further to the demolition of Nakagin Capsule Tower, leads to a definition of three Metabolist urban paradigms—megastructure, group form, and ruins—which continue to inspire experiments in architecture, city design, and conservation.Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movementis a key book for architectural and urban historians, architects and all those interested in avant-garde design and Japanese architecture.

Foreword by Arata Isozaki 1. Introduction: City as Organism 2. Metabolism 1960 3. Metabolist Utopias 4. Myths of Tokyo Bay 5. Structure and Symbol 6. Expo ’70 7. The Capsule Tower 8. Epilogue: Seeing the Future through the Past

Dr. Zhongjie Lin is an architect, urban designer, and scholar of urbanism. He is Associate Professor of City Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as director of Urban Design concentration. He is also founding director of Futurepolis, an awarding-winning international architecture and planning practice. Dr. Lin is author or co-author of several books including Urban Design in the Global Perspective (2006), Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement (2010/2023), The Making of a Chinese Model New Town (2012), Vertical Urbanism (2018), and Rio de Janeiro: Urban Expansion and Environment (2019). He holds a Ph.D. in architectural history and criticism from University of Pennsylvania and an M.Arch from Tongji University.