Shinchintaisha

On the fourth of October 2022, Nakagin Capsule Tower disappeared from the face of the earth. One of the most famous buildings of the 20th century (if not in the entire history of human civilization) was carefully demolished, despite protests from architecture lovers, researchers, residents and architects. As a matter of fact, they rarely help in general, and this case wasn’t an exception. The skyscraper, designed half a century earlier by Japanese architectural icon Kishō Kurokawa, was erased from the Ginza district landscape in Tokyo.

The Nakagin Capsule Tower was the most daring realisation of the idea of ‘metabolism’ – an architectural movement co-founded by Kishō Kurokawa. Initiated in the 1960s, the direction assumed that architecture is a flexible system, ready for constant transformation. Analogous to biological processes, buildings must be able to replace worn-out cells with new ones according to changing needs.

The exhibition invites visitors to observe and participate in the process of the building’s transformation with architects, designers, artists, and researchers. Tracing the presence of the Nakagin Capsule Tower in the minds of various social groups, contemporary history, pop culture, media, and virtual space, we look for traces and different forms of its existence that allow us to tell the story of the architecture’s ‘afterlife’ from different perspectives.