nakagin tower (1970)

This is one of the Google Image Search result for "Nakagin Capsule Tower"

A group of Japanese architects including Kurokawa was interested in introducing a new philosophy of change to the western world in 1960s. They were dreaming of utopian schemes giving birth to the notion of the city as an organism which changes at various rates. One of the architect, Kikutake wanted to become a doctor before he became an architect so the word "Metabolism" was coined for their manifesto and philosophy.

Metabolism became an extended biological analogy meant to replace the mechanical analogy of orthodox modern architecture. It compared buildings and cities to an energy process found in all of life: the cycles of change, the constant renewal and destruction of organic tissue. By clearly seperating parts of a building or city which have different rates of change, they allow certain structures to remain undisturbed when others wear out.

"We have in Japan an aesthetic of death, whereas you have an aesthetic of eternity. The Ise Shrines are rebuilt every twenty years in the same form, or spirit; whereas you try to preserve the actual Greek Temple, the original material, as if it could last for eternity."

The Nakagin Capsule Tower is the world's first capsule architecture built for actual use. Capsule architecture design, establishment of the capsule as room and insertion of the capsule into a mega-structure, expresses its contemporaneousness with other works of liberated architecture from the later 1960's, in particular England's Archigram Group, France's Paul Memon, and Yona Friedman.[1]

All the furniture is built in - the bedside control console, the stereo tape-dect and calculators - and yet the tiny space and propotions are the conventional ones. He combines steel capsules (modified from shipping containers) with all sorts of traditional components existing on the market.

This is how the Nakagin Tower looks in 2000s

The Nakagin Tower has 140 capsules, each sold for between £5.000 - £7.000 within one month of erection. A prototype was placed on the ground and inspected before people bought them. The quick sale represents a pay-off on a financial gamble since the market was not known -except roughly as that of "in-town bachelors". Actually, 30 per cent of the units have been bought by companies whose head office is in another city. When a representative companies whose head office is in another city. When a representative comes to Tokyo to negotiate he stays in the company capsule rather than a hotel as it is cheaper in the long run. Another 30 per cent are used by families as an extension to their house - as studies, playrooms, studios or dens. This unpredicted usage led Kurokawa to a new notion (and neologism) the "time-community", that is a community of individuals not based on the community", that is a community of individuals not based on the traditional determinants of place or location, but the different activities any individual would perform over time.

A businessman might inhabit five or six different places in any one day, each of them being a momentary community. This, it turns out, is again somewhat traditional since the Japanese do not usually entertain at home, but rather take guests to one the evening clubs that exists everywhere: transposed living rooms as it were.

As Kurokawa points out, Homo movens, the man who spends much of his time travelling and moving house, is a phenomenon of modern America and Japan, but, as he adds characteristically, there is a traditional precedent. The sixteenth-century poet Basho said "travelling is a kind of home". Kurokawa himself spends roughly 20 per cent of his time outside Japan and another 20 per cent in local cities outside of Tokyo - which means he spends a lot of his life in hotels, cars, aeroplanes (a point he wishes to extend generally as "capsule architecture"