THE AESTHETICS AND/OR FORMALISM OF CHANGE: Paradoxes and Contradictions in the Metabolist Movement

The chapter will investigate some of the paradoxical and contradictory issues that characterized the activities of the Metabolists in Japanese architecture of the 1960s and even beyond. After the numerous unrealized futuristic or utopian visions for urban renewal in postwar Japan, the young architects in the Metabolism Group embarked on their own individual practices and were determined to implement aspects of their ideas for change, interchangeability, and thus flexibility in built architecture. This chapter will examine the relationship between the Metabolist theories and the changing realities in society, which first prompted the emergence, then shaped the development, and eventually fostered the decline of the movement. Special focus will be on the means through which the new ideas of urban design were translated into built structures: the formal and structural representation of change, and the actual change they intended to promote. It will also shed light on the divergent and often contradictory approaches by the individual architects as well as the unusually close relationship between this avant-garde movement and (political) authorities. Finally, it will consider the legacies of the movement and the relevance of its ideas for the much-changed world of today.