These tiny apartments were built to be replaced so why are their residents fighting to save them?

Nakagin Capsule Tower

How do you preserve a building that was, in a sense, built to be disposed of? And should you even try? That’s the question facing residents of Nakagin Capsule Tower in the Shimbashi district of Tokyo. When their apartment block was constructed in 1972, its architect, Kisho Kurokawa, hoped owners would remove and replace each of 140 10-meter-square apartments every quarter century or so. This type of building, known as metabolist architecture, never really caught on, and, as Christian Dimmer, professor of Urbanism at Tokyo University says “The zeitgeist of metabolism is frozen, literally encapsulated in this building.”...Continue Reading

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