ARTS APPRECIATION

Metabolist Movement

INTRODUCTION
METABOLISM Metabolism can be defined as a chemical processes that occurs with in an organism to maintain its life.
METABOLISM IN ARCHITECTURE

If architecture is used as a meta-organism. Metabolism in architecture is a processes that occur with in the architecture to maintain and sustain it.

LEVELS OF METABOLISM
There are three levels of metabolism to consider for architecture in the urban environment. MACRO LEVEL MESO LEVEL MICRO LEVEL

MACRO LEVEL IN METABOLISM

The city's infrastructure is viewed as its vascular system which transports urban nutrients from one place to another.

In this vascular system, water and gas electricity food and materials pipelines cables and wires roadways and railways

people

vehicles

MESO LEVEL IN METABOLISM

At meso level metabolism occurs with in the architecture. Architecture is reliant up on people to sustain it. The architecture also takes in resources, such as water and energy, which prevents deterioration of the physical structure and maintain interior environment .

MICRO LEVEL IN METABOLISM

The micro level metabolism seeks to strengthen the relationship between humans and architecture in which they dwell, by providing not only shelter, but food and water also as well. The architecture will do this while maintaining the macro, meso and micro relationships.

Genesis
The metabolism in architecture or metabolist movement was initially originated in japan. In the late 1950s a small group of young Japanese architects and designers joined forces under the title of "Metabolism". Their visions for cities of the future inhabited by a mass society were characterized by large scale, flexible, and expandable structures that evoked the processes of organic growth. In their view, the traditional laws of fixed form and function were obsolete. Metabolism arose in post-World War II Japan, and so much of the work produced by the movement is primarily concerned with housing issues.

The World Design Conference of 1960 was held in Japan, and a group of young Japanese architects were involved with the planning. Under the guidance of Kenzo Tange, the architects Takashi Asada, Kisho Kurokawa, Kiyonori Kikutake, and writer Noboru Kawazoe often met and discussed the direction of Japanese architecture and urbanism. During the World Design Conference, the Metabolist group presented their first declaration as a bilingual pamphlet called Metabolism 1960: The proposals for a New Urbanism.

Ideology
The ideas of Metabolism as implemented in modern culture were philosophical as well as architectural, and ostensibly based on Buddhist notions of impermanence and change. Changeability and Flexibility were the key elements that the Melabolist Group Seized upon and explored.

Metabolist designs relied heavily on advanced technology, and they often consist of adaptable plug-in mega structures.
WHAT IS METABOLISM?
Metabolism, as we know it, is the biological process by which life is maintained through the continuous cycle of producing and destroying protoplasm. To the Japanese architects who adopted the name, it meant creating a dynamic environment that could live and grow by discarding its out-dated parts and regenerating newer, more viable elements. To develop a building system that could cope with the problems of our rapidly changing society, and at the same time maintain stabilized human lives Noboru Kawazoe, From Metabolism to Metapolis-Proposal for the City of the Future,

Habitat 67 is a housing complex and landmark located on the MarcDrouin Quay on the Saint Lawrence River at 2600, Pierre Dupuy Avenue in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Its design was created by architect Moshe Safdie based on his master's thesis at McGill University and built as part of Expo 67.

Expo 67 was nicknamed "Man and his World", taken from Antoine de Saint Exupry's memoir Terre des hommes (literally "Land of Men"), translated as Wind, Sand and Stars. Housing was one of the main themes of Expo 67. Habitat 67 then became a thematic pavilion visited by thousands of visitors who came from around the world. During Expo 67 it was also the temporary residence of the many dignitaries coming to Montreal.

It was designed to integrate the variety and diversity of scattered private homes with the economics and density of a modern apartment building. Modular, interlocking concrete forms define the space. The project was designed to create affordable housing with close but private quarters, each equipped with a garden. The building was believed to illustrate the new lifestyle people would live in increasingly crowded cities around the world. The complex was originally meant to be vastly larger. Due to its architectural cachet, demand for the building's units has made them more expensive than originally envisioned.

The building is owned by its tenants, who formed a limited partnership that purchased the building from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation in 1985.

FAMOUS PROJECTS
The Nakagin Capsule Tower is a mixed-use residential and office tower designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa and located in Shimbashi, Tokyo, Japan. Completed in 1972, the building is a rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement that became emblematic of Japan's post-war cultural resurgence. The building was the world's first example of capsule architecture built for actual use. The building is still in use as of 2010, but has fallen into disrepair

Nakagin Capsule Tower A sample room within the Nakagin Capsule Tower

Recognized by its inhabitants as being 'squalid' and 'cramped' they voted to demolish it and start over. While this would be the erasure of a key example of one of the few realized and even fewer extant examples of the Japanese Metabolist style, its preservation would go against the very tenants of the style's own making.

Introduced at the World Design Conference in Tokyo in 1960, by the Japanese Architects Kenzo Tange, Kisho Kurokawa, and Kiyonoru Kikutake, this style was intended to create structures that were thought of as a tree- a permanent element, with the dwelling units as leaves- temporary elements which fall down and are renewed according to the needs of the moment. The buildings can grow within this structure and die and grow again- but the structure remains . The structure within Kurokawa's tree is not the problem- but the leaves themselves. Outmoded, these machines for living hang on. Contrary to the Metabolist mantra, they were never regenerated. They are all in their autumnal state with no new buds to take

their place.

As Ouroussoff explains, In theory, more capsules could be plugged-in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan's technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker. But resistance against change, and the impractical nature of replacement modules has left this building static, and unable to achieve the flexibility its creation strove to realize. The author's very acknowledgement that nobody has "stepped up with a viable plan for how to save it" is ironic in that its salvation is in own leprosy and regeneration. It by its very existence was meant to shed its parts to the technological trash heap and be rebuilt. What would ever be expected to remain is the "permanent"- the armature holding the units- a skeleton never recognized as the organizing factor .

Kenzo Tange was a Japanese architect, and winner of the 1987 Pritzker Prize for architecture. He was one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, combining traditional Japanese styles with modernism, and designed major buildings on five continents. Tange was also an influential protagonist of the structuralism movement. He said: "It was, I believe, around 1959 or at the beginning of the sixties that I began to think about what I was later to call structuralism", (cited in Plan 2/1982, Amsterdam). Influenced from an early age by the Swiss modernist, Le Corbusier, Tange gained international recognition in 1949 when he won the competition for the design of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Joining the group of architects known as Team X in the late 1950s he steered the group towards the movement that became .

The modular expansion of Tange's Metabolist visions had some influence on Archigram with their plugin mega structures. The Metabolist movement gave momentum to Kikutake's career. Although his Marine City proposals (submitted by Tange at CIAM) were not realized, his Miyakonojo City Hall (1966) was a more Metabolist example of Tange's own Nichinan Cultural Centre (1962). Although the Osaka Expo had marked a decline in the Metabolist movement, it resulted in a "handing over" of the reigns to a younger generation of architects such as Kazuo Shinohara and Arata Isozaki. In an interview with Jeremy Melvin at the Royal Academy of Arts, Kengo Kuma explained that, at the age of ten, he was inspired to become an architect after seeing Tange's Olympic arenas, which were constructed in 1964.

Yona Friedman became a French citizen in 1966. In 1956, the X International Congress of Modern Architecture in Dubrovnik, his "Manifeste de l'architecture mobile" contributed to question definitely the daring will planning to architectural design and urbanism. It was during that conference, and thanks especially to the youth of the Team 10, that "mobile architecture" was coined in the sense of "mobility of living." With the example of "Ville spatiale", Friedman set out - for the first time - the principles of an architecture capable of understanding the constant changes that characterize the "social mobility" and based on "infrastructure" that provide housing. Planning rules could be created and recreated, according to the need of the inhabitants and residents. Its focus on people themselves arises from its direct experience of homeless refugees, first in European cities facing war and disaster and later in Israel, where, in the early years of the State, thousands of people landed every day, with housing problems

In 1958, Yona Friedman published his first manifesto : "Mobile architecture". It described a new kind of mobility not of the buildings, but for the inhabitants, who are given a new freedom. Mobile architecture is the "dwelling decided on by the occupant" by way of "infrastructures that are neither determined nor determining". Mobile architecture embodies an architecture available for a "mobile society". To deal with it, the classical architect invented "the Average Man". The projects of architects in the 1950s were undertaken, according to Friedman, to meet the needs of this make-believe entity, and not as an attempt to meet the needs of the actual members of this mobile society. The teaching of architecture was largely responsible for the "classical" architect's under-estimation of the role of the user. Furthermore this teaching did not embrace any real theory of architecture. Friedman proposed then teaching manuals for the fundamentals of architecture for the general public. The spatial city, which is a materialization of this theory, makes it possible for everyone to develop his or her own hypothesis. This is why, in the mobile city, buildings should : touch the ground over a minimum area be capable of being dismantled and moved and be alterable as required by the individual occupant.

The Spatial City is the most significant application of "mobile architecture". It is a spatial, three-dimensional structure raised up on piles which contains inhabited volumes, fitted inside some of the "voids", alternating with other unused volumes. It is designed on the basis of trihedral elements which operate as "neighbourhoods" where dwellings are freely distributed.
This structure introduce a kind of merger between countryside and city and may span: certain unavailable sites, areas where building is not possible or permitted (expanses of water, marshland), areas that have already been built upon (an existing city), above farmland. This spanning technique which includes container structures ushers in a new development in town-planning. Raised plans increase the original area of the city becoming three-dimensional. The tiering of the spatial city on several independent levels, one on top of the other, determines "spatial town-planning" both from the functional and from the aesthetic viewpoint. The lower level may be earmarked for public life and for premises designed for community services as well as pedestrian areas. The piles contain the vertical means of transport (lifts, staircases). The superposition of levels should make it possible to build a whole industrial city, or a residential or commercial city, on the same site. In this way, the Spatial City forms an "artificial topography". This grid suspended in space outlines a new cartography of the terrain with the help of a continuous and indeterminate homogeneous network with a major positive outcome: this modular grid would authorize the limitless growth of the city.

To develop a building system that could cope with the problems of our rapidly changing society, and at the same time maintain stabilized human lives Noboru Kawazoe, From Metabolism to MetapolisProposal for the City of the Future,

BIBLIOGRAPHY
WIKIPEDIA
http://www.paulrudolph.org http://www.worldpress.com Architecture Metabolism: a restorative, organic architecture in the urban : by Timothy Hoyles

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