![]() ![]() “Instead of tearing down a whole building, can you repair a piece of it?” asks Dunlop Fletcher. Kurokawa’s architecture connects with a host of contemporary concerns: tiny homes, sustainability and density. Through their efforts, Maeda and the others have helped keep the concepts that gave rise to the Capsule Tower alive. And it was very special that they invited me to that space. “They were these interesting characters who each had a capsule and they rented an apartment across the street and they would get together every day to watch the building being dismantled. She traveled to Tokyo as the tower was coming down and gathered with Maeda and others who owned capsules within the building. ![]() (For months, I watched the entire dismantling process on social media.)ĭunlop Fletcher had been intrigued by the building for some time. And this quirky yet beloved tower was demolished last year. The idea was that capsules would be replaced and upgraded over the years - and that the owner of any given capsule could relocate it to other towers that might ultimately be built. (From the street, the building resembled a massive sci-fi honeycomb.) Each of these capsules sported a bed, a fold-out desk and a reel-to-reel tape player, and they were marketed toward businessmen who regularly overnighted in Tokyo. ![]() Nakagin consisted of two central 13-floor service cores, onto which 140 prefab pods were attached. The tower, designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa and completed in 1972, was perhaps the most prominent example of the short-lived Metabolism movement of the 20th century, which sought to create buildings and megastructures that could be more organic or cellular in nature - structures that could expand, contract or mutate on demand. When demolition crews in Tokyo began to pry apart the Nakagin Capsule Tower last spring, it felt like the end to one of architecture’s more curious experiments. Miranda, art and design columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and instead I’m in L.A., rounding up the week’s essential arts news: A capsule, a concept I’d rather be having tea at the Prada Caffè at Harrod’s in London. ![]()
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