Download or read book Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement written by Zhongjie Lin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metabolism, the Japanese architectural avant-garde movement of the 1960s, profoundly influenced contemporary architecture and urbanism. This book focuses on the Metabolists’ utopian concept of the city and investigates the design and political implications of their visionary planning in the postwar society. At the root of the group’s urban utopias was a particular biotechical notion of the city as an organic process. It stood in opposition to the Modernist view of city design and led to such radical design concepts as marine civilization and artificial terrains, which embodied the metabolists’ ideals of social change. Tracing the evolution of Metabolism from its inception at the 1960 World Design Conference to its spectacular swansong at the Osaka World Exposition in 1970, this book situates Metabolism in the context of Japan’s mass urban reconstruction, economic miracle, and socio-political reorientation. This new study will interest architectural and urban historians, architects and all those interested in avant-garde design and Japanese architecture.
Download or read book Metabolism in Architecture written by Kishō Kurokawa and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even in a country where outstanding achievements have become almost a commonplace, the Japanese architect, Kisho Kurokawa, appears as both a remarkable and a remarkably successful man. With buildings in the United States and Eastern and Western Europe as well as in Japan, he has established an international reputation as a leading figure amongst the younger generation of architects. At the age of forty he already had thirty-five major buildings and seventeen books to his credit; four new towns are being built to his designs; he heads a company of over a hundred employees, he runs a think-tank and an urban design bureau and for variety he has his own television programme with a regular audience of some 30 million. Behind these statistics lies a prodigious vitality expressed in original and stimulating buildings. -- from book jacket.
Download or read book Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement written by Zhongjie Lin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid Japan’s political turbulence in 1960, seven architects and designers founded Metabolism to propagate radical ideas of urbanism. Kenzō 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 the city 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 postindustrial 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 recent 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. Kenzō Tange and the Metabolist Movement is a key book for architectural and urban historians, architects, and all those interested in avant-garde design, Japanese architecture, and contemporary urbanism.
Download or read book The Metabolist Imagination written by William O. Gardner and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan’s postwar urban imagination through the Metabolism architecture movement and visionary science fiction authors The devastation of the Second World War gave rise to imaginations both utopian and apocalyptic. In Japan, a fascinating confluence of architects and science fiction writers took advantage of this space to begin remaking urban design. In The Metabolist Imagination, William O. Gardner explores the unique Metabolism movement, which allied with science fiction authors to foresee the global cities that would emerge in the postwar era. This first comparative study of postwar Japanese architecture and science fiction builds on the resurgence of interest in Metabolist architecture while establishing new directions for exploration. Gardner focuses on how these innovators created unique versions of shared concepts—including futurity, megastructures, capsules, and cybercities—making lasting contributions that resonate with contemporary conversations around cyberpunk, climate change, anime, and more. The Metabolist Imagination features original documentation of collaborations between giants of postwar Japanese art and architecture, such as the landmark 1970 Osaka Expo. It also provides the most sustained English-language discussion to date of the work of Komatsu Sakyō, considered one of the “big three” authors of postwar Japanese science fiction. These studies are underscored by Gardner’s insightful approach—treating architecture as a form of speculative fiction while positioning science fiction as an intervention into urban design—making it a necessary read for today’s visionaries.
Download or read book Metabolism the City of the Future written by and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First presented as a manifesto in the 1960s in Japan, "Metabolism" is a theory of architecture contending that "buildings and cities should be designed and developed in the same continuous way that the material substance of a natural organism is produced." From the time of Japan's postwar redevelopment to its period of rapid economic growth, the theory gave birth to grand visions of future cities, encouraged the realization of much experimental architecture, and also provided the foundation on which many of Japan's contemporary world-renowned architects and designers could build their careers. It is the most widely known modern architecture theory to have emerged from Japan. This exhibition is the first ever to pose the question of what significance Metabolism holds today. It draws on various documents and models to explore the thoughts and work of Tange Kenzo, which set the scene for the emergence of Metabolism, and the activities of the Metabolist architects and others during the 1960s up until Osaka's Expo '70, which in many ways was a showcase for the theory. It also represents an important opportunity to think about the necessity of archiving and preserving distinguished historical documents and records related to the movement.
Download or read book Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement written by Zhongjie Lin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metabolism, the Japanese architectural avant-garde movement of the 1960s, profoundly influenced contemporary architecture and urbanism. This book focuses on the Metabolists’ utopian concept of the city and investigates the design and political implications of their visionary planning in the postwar society. At the root of the group’s urban utopias was a particular biotechical notion of the city as an organic process. It stood in opposition to the Modernist view of city design and led to such radical design concepts as marine civilization and artificial terrains, which embodied the metabolists’ ideals of social change. Tracing the evolution of Metabolism from its inception at the 1960 World Design Conference to its spectacular swansong at the Osaka World Exposition in 1970, this book situates Metabolism in the context of Japan’s mass urban reconstruction, economic miracle, and socio-political reorientation. This new study will interest architectural and urban historians, architects and all those interested in avant-garde design and Japanese architecture.
Download or read book Project Japan written by Rem Koolhaas and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metabolism was a movement launched in Japan that took inspiration for buildings and cities from biological systems. With interviews and commentary and hundreds of images, Project Japan unearths a history that casts new light on the key issues that both enervate and motivate architecture today.
Download or read book Kenzo Tange written by Seng Kuan and published by Lars Muller Publishers. This book was released on 2012 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kenzo Tange (1913-2005) is a peerless figure among twentieth-century Japanese architects, unmatched in his talent, influence, and versatility. A leading force of the Metabolist movement, he was the first non-Western architect whose works would be embraced as universal in value. This unique assemblage of new scholarship by an international team of experts reframes Tange according to the contingencies of Japanese modernism as well as contemporary discourses of cultural identity, technology, urbanization, and the synthesis of the arts. Case studies on celebrated works-Hiroshima, Tokyo Bay Plan, and Yoyogi Stadiums-clarify Tange's wide-ranging interests and design methodology. Illustrated with archival drawings and period photographs, this volume provides fresh and compelling perspectives on the practices, discourses, and production contexts of Tange's work as well as the architecture and urbanism of postwar Japan. Kenzo Tange-Architecture for the World represents the most serious and comprehensive reassessment of Tange in the English language in decades.
Download or read book Megastructure written by Reyner Banham and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A long-sought reprint of this classic of architectural history and criticism, surveying a movement that would inspire architects, fantasists, and filmmakers alike. It is an architectural concept as alluring as it is elusive, as futuristic as it is primordial. Megastructure is what it sounds like: a vastly scaled edifice that can contain potentially countless uses, contexts, and adaptations. Theorized and briefly experimented with in built form in the 1960s, megastructures almost as quickly went out of fashion in the profession. But Reyner Banham's 1976 book compiled the origin stories and ongoing mythos of this visionary movement, seeking to chart its lively rise, rapid fall, and ongoing meaning. Now back in print after decades and with original editions fetching well over $100 on the secondary market, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past is part of the recent surge in attention to this quixotic form, of which some examples were built but to this day remains--decades after its codification--more of a poetic idea than a real architectural type. Banham, among the most gifted and incisive architectural critics and historians of his time, sought connections between theoretical origins in Le Corbusier's more starry-eyed drawings to the flurry of theories by the Japanese Metabolist architects, to less intentional examples in military architecture, industry, infrastructure, and the emerging instances in pop culture and art. Had he written the book a few years later he would find an abundance of examples in speculative art and science fiction cinema, mediums where it continues to provoke wonder to this day. A long-sought study by an author who combined imagination, wit, and pioneering scholarship, the republication of Megastructure is an opportunity for scholars and laypeople alike to return to the origins of this fantastic urban idea.
Download or read book Between Land and Sea written by Kiyonori Kikutake and published by Lars Müller Publishers. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In cooperation with Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Download or read book Ise Prototype of Japanese Architecture written by Asahi Shinbunsha and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1965 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruno Taut ranks the Ise Shrine with the Parthenon in architectural importance. John Burchard, in his preface, characterizes Ise as "one of the great architectural achievements of history. ... I suppose," he comments, "Ise has many lessons for contemporary architects once they get over being embarrassed by it." Robin Boyd, in his book, 'Kenzo Tange', observes that it was only after the Second World War that the West realized that many qualities of modern architecture were quite old. "These qualities had existed for centuries in Japanese buildings. ... It [Japanese tradition] relied on the use of ingenious construction and untreated natural material to build a sort of refined extension of nature: a concentration of nature's own kind of beauty. Thus Japan was rediscovered." The Ise Shrine, situated some 270 miles west of Tokyo, is both old and new. The shrine dates from at least A.D. 685, but every twenty years it is completely rebuilt. Each rebuilding--there have been 59 so far--is scrupulously undertaken to guarantee an exact and identical reproduction of the preceding shrine. In 1953, after the most recent renewal, but prior to the transfer of religious objects, not only were the authors allowed to inspect the prohibited area--it is ringed by four fences and contains the most important buildings--but they were granted unprecedented permission to photograph it. This book represents the first opportunity for most Westerners to view and study one of the architectural wonders of the world. 'ISE : Prototype of Japanese Architecture begins with a preface by John Burchard and a foreword by the internationally recognized architect, Kenzo Tange. Tange also has written one of the two main essays in the book; the other is by Noboru Kawazoe, in which Ise is examined primarily in terms of Japanese mythology and history. Tange discusses Ise in an architectural perspective; he writes, "In the subsequent history of Japanese architecture, extending over more than a thousand years, it has proved impossible to advance beyond the form of Ise. ... Along with the Parthenon Ise represents the peak in the history of world architecture. 'ISE : Prototype of Japanese Architecture belongs' in every fine arts collection and in every architectural library. The photographs, reproduced with exquisite care, make this book an invaluable architectural study, a work of genuine scholarship, and a visual delight. The text, especially prepared for a Western audience, invites the attention of all those interested in Japanese culture. Scholars of comparative religion and cultural anthropology will also find the book of value."--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Last Futures written by Douglas Murphy and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1960s the world was faced with impending disaster: the height of the Cold War, the end of oil, and the decline of great cities throughout the world. Out of this crisis came a new generation of thinkers, designers and engineers who hoped to build a better future, influenced by visions of geodesic domes, walking cities, and a meaningful connection with nature. In this brilliant work of cultural history, architect Douglas Murphy traces the lost archeology of the present-day through the works of thinkers and designers such as Buckminster Fuller, the ecological pioneer Stewart Brand, the Archigram architects who envisioned the Plug-In City in the '60s, as well as co-operatives in Vienna, communes in the Californian desert, and protesters on the streets of Paris. In this mind-bending account of the last avant garde, we see not just the source of our current problems but also some powerful alternative futures.
Download or read book Anime Architecture written by Stefan Riekele and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unrivaled visual guide to the cityscapes and buildings of the most celebrated and influential anime movies. Anime has been influencing cinema, literature, comic books, and video games around the world for decades. Part of what makes anime so popular are the memorable and breathtakingly detailed worlds designed by the creators, from futuristic cities of steel to romantic rural locales. Anime Architecture presents the fantastic environments created by the most important and revered directors and illustrators of Japanese animated films, such as Hideaki Anno, Koji Morimoto, and Mamoru Oshii. Unprecedented access to vast studio archives of original background paintings, storyboards, drafts, and film excerpts offers readers a privileged view into the earliest stages of conception, development, and finished versions of iconic scenes from critically acclaimed movies such as Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metropolis, and more. Revealing the secret creative processes of these major anime studios, Anime Architecture is perfect for anyone touched by the beauty and imagination of classic anime, offering inspiration for artists, illustrators, architects, designers, video game makers, and dreamers.
Download or read book Nurturing Dreams written by Fumihiko Maki and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-09-21 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unavailable as a collection until now, these essays document both the intellectual journey of one of the world's leading architects and a critical period in the evolution of architectural thought. Born in Tokyo, educated in Japan and the United States, and principal of an internationally acclaimed architectural practice, celebrated architect Fumihiko Maki brings to his writings on architecture a perspective that is both global and uniquely Japanese. Influenced by post-Bauhaus internationalism, sympathetic to the radical urban architectural vision of Team X, and a participant in the avant-garde movement Metabolism, Maki has been at the forefront of his profession for decades. This collection of essays documents the evolution of architectural modernism and Maki's own fifty-year intellectual journey during a critical period of architectural and urban history. Maki's treatment of his two overarching themes—the contemporary city and modernist architecture—demonstrates strong (and sometimes unexpected) linkages between urban theory and architectural practice. Images and commentary on three of Maki's own works demonstrate the connection between his writing and his designs. Moving through the successive waves of modernism, postmodernism, neomodernism, and other isms, these essays reflect how several generations of architectural thought and expression have been resolved within one career.
Download or read book Code X written by Peter Eisenman and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Eisenman's competition-winning project for the City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, is a formidable battery of museums, libraries, and auditoriums, a cultural acropolis atop a spectacular hillside site in northeastern Spain. By excavating the hilltop and arranging six buildings as a kind of artificial topography, Eisenman creates a new warped landscape that seems to merge building and ground, that occupies the hilltop without seeming to have been built upon it. In CODEX, the New York-based Eisenman, known for a career of formal investigations, reveals in essays and illustrations his theory of coding as a device for producing form. Through more than three hundred line drawings and perspectives, the development of the code--and the buildings and landscape it informs--becomes apparent, culminating in a giant earthwork as excavation of the site begins.
Download or read book Tokyo 1955 1970 written by Doryun Chong and published by The Museum of Modern Art. This book was released on 2012 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nov. 18, 2012-Feb. 25, 2013.
Download or read book Beyond Utopia written by Agnes Nyilas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-25 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Megastructure proposals by the Japanese Metabolism group are commonly identified with the concept of utopia. Beyond this partial understanding, Agnes Nyilas suggests that rather than being merely utopian, the Megastructure of Metabolism represents a uniquely amalgam genre: the myth camouflaged as utopia. Although its Megastructure seemingly describes a desirable future condition as utopia does, it also comprises certain cultural images rooted in the collective (un)conscious of Japanese people, in accordance with the general interpretation of myth. The primary narrative of Beyond Utopia thus follows the gradual unfolding of the myth-like characteristics of its Megastructure. Myth is dealt here as an interdisciplinary subject in line with contemporary myth theories. After expounding the mechanism underlying the growing demand for a new myth in architecture (the origin of the myth), Part I discovers the formal characteristics of the Megastructure of Metabolism to give a hint of the real intention behind it. Based on this, Part II is a reexamination of their design methods, which aims to clarify the function of the myth and to suggest the meaning behind it. Finally, Part III deals with the subject matter of the myth by disclosing the meaning unfolding in the story, and suggests a new reading of Metabolism urban theory: as an attempt to reconsider the traditional Japanese space concept.
